Having found little success as a portrait painter, John Quidor turned to literary inspiration and adapted the popular writings of Washington Irving for many of his paintings. Here, Quidor illustrates the culminating moment of Irving’s tale Wolfert Webber’s Golden Dream (1824), set in the seventeenth-century Dutch colony of New York. The protagonist, Wolfert Webber, celebrates his new wealth as a real estate magnate after developers looking to expand the city limits on the isle of Manhattan purchase his cabbage farm.