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At the end of the 19th century, the European tradition of trompe-l’œil met with a new destiny in the United States. Painters, active on the East Coast – the most urbanized region, where the movement of money was the most considerable – turned to money as their exclusive subject. In this case, not coins, but bills: greenbacks, paper dollars of fragile value, the money of the poor. William Harnet, John Haberle, Victor Dubreuil, others after them (Charles Meurer, John Frederick Peto, and still later Otis Kaye) painted the wear and tear of these bills, crumpled, worn, almost ephemeral as a result of changing hands. Their paintings are illusions: deception echoing that of this unreliable money that hardly allows acquiring anything. Certain works have an openly political character: Dubreuil’s The Cross of Gold draws its motif and title from William Jennings Bryan, unfortunate presidential candidate, who in 1896, defended bimetallism instead of a money based uniquely on gold: “You shall not crucify mankind upon the cross of gold” he exclaimed at the Democratic convention. This same Dubreuil of European origin and anarchist convictions, as well as a sulfurous past (he was employed by a bank in Paris and left with the takings) did not hesitate nevertheless to propose less metaphorical compositions: barrels filled with banknotes that had lost their value ( Money to Burn) a safe filled up with railroad stock ( Safe Money), or – quite simply – the frontal scene, quite cinematic, of a bank robbery ( Don’t Make a Move).