Abstract
AbstractThis article examines John Quidor’s 1832 painting Money Diggers as a pictorial allegory of real estate speculation that engages the cultural discourses and material forces of the antebellum land market. As I show, Quidor was an active participant in that market: in the 1820s and 1830s, the artist speculated enthusiastically on land in the Illinois Military Tract, engineering a series of profitable deals that underwrote his tenuous career as an artist. Inspired by these experiences, I argue, Quidor composed a pictorial interpretation of a well-known literary satire of speculation—Washington Irving’s 1824 short story “Money Diggers”—that ultimately proceeded far beyond its source to advance a dark allegory that visualized the most unsettling facets of risky investment and western settlement. Examining Quidor’s canvas alongside promotional texts and images, landscape paintings, and other cultural imaginings of the frontier, I show that Money Diggers invokes and overturns the central aesthetic and eco...
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