Francis Edmonds and the Speculative Economy of Painting

Abstract

In the years between Andrew Jackson's election in 1828 and the opening of the Civil War, Francis William Edmonds straddled the spheres of art and commerce through his various pursuits, which at one time or another (and often simultaneously) included banker, painter, bank note engraver, arts administrator and treasurer, land speculator, and farmer. This examination of Edmonds's 1852 painting, The Speculator, affords us a closer view of an artist situated at the nexus of business and art. A constellation of images related to The Speculator bear the traces of Edmonds's own ambivalence toward his involvement in the commercialization of culture that marked the late 1830s and 1840s. Reading the painting against the artistic and economic contexts in which it was conceived, executed, and exhibited reveals how the work thematizes the ambiguities associated with speculative buying, selling, and even seeing as these activities shaped the processes of producing and viewing artworks in a cultural moment in which the b...