Currier and Ives

• 1. Introduction

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  Currier and Ives, a printmaking firm based in New York City, turned a devastating fire into a business empire. In 1835, a lithograph depicting flames sweeping through the city's business district sold thousands of copies in just four days. That single moment revealed something the firm's founder, Nathaniel Currier, had understood before almost anyone else: ordinary Americans were hungry to see their world on paper, at a price they could actually afford.

  What followed was seven decades of relentless production. Artists turned out two to three new images every week. Women working assembly lines colored prints by hand, one color each. Pushcart vendors carried the results through city streets. By the time the firm closed in 1907, it had published at least 7,500 lithographs and produced more than a million prints. How did a humble lithography shop become the visual record of an entire century? And why do some of those images remain deeply troubling to this day?

• 2. Nathaniel Currier's Early Years

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  Nathaniel Currier was born on the 27th of March 1813, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the second of four children. His parents were distant cousins who lived a spare, modest life. When Nathaniel was eight years old, his father died without warning, leaving him and his eleven-year-old brother Lorenzo to support a household that included a six-year-old sister, a two-year-old brother, and their mother.

  At fifteen, Nathaniel apprenticed at the Boston lithography shop of William and John Pendleton. By twenty, he had moved to Philadelphia for contract work with M.E.D. Brown, a noted engraver and printer. His first New York partnership, with a local printmaker named Stodart, specialized in job printing and produced music manuscripts among other things. Currier grew dissatisfied with the poor returns and ended it in 1835, setting himself up as "N. Currier, Lithographer."

  The disaster print that changed everything came that same year. The image of the Merchant's Exchange fire sold thousands of copies in four days, pointing Currier toward news-driven lithography. In 1840, his print "Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington" proved so successful that he secured a weekly insert in the New York Sun. That year, the firm shifted permanently from job printing to independent print publishing.

• 3. James Ives and the Partnership

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  James Merritt Ives was born on the 5th of March 1824, in New York City. He came to Currier's firm as a bookkeeper and accountant. The connection was personal: Ives had married Caroline Clark in 1852, and she was the sister-in-law of Nathaniel's brother Charles Currier. It was Charles who first recommended Ives to his brother.

  Nathaniel Currier noticed Ives's instinct for the market alongside his financial discipline. Ives modernized the bookkeeping, reorganized inventory, and tightened the print process. He helped interview artists and craftsmen and had a particular gift for reading popular taste. He pushed the firm into new territory: political satire, sentimental country scenes, sleigh rides, steamboat races. In 1857, Currier made him a full partner and changed the company's name to Currier and Ives.

  After Currier died in 1888, Ives remained active in the firm until his own death in 1895. Both men's sons continued the business after them, until it was finally liquidated in 1907.

• 4. The Factory Behind the Prints

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  From 1866 onward, Currier and Ives occupied three floors at 33 Spruce Street in New York. Hand-operated printing presses ran on the third floor. Artists, stone grinders, and lithographers worked on the fourth. Colorists occupied the fifth.

  Every lithograph began on a slab of limestone. Preparing a single stone often took more than a week. Prints were pulled by hand. Then a team of a dozen or more women, many of them immigrants from Germany with art training, colored each print by assembly-line methods, one worker assigned one color. They were paid six dollars for every hundred prints they colored.

  The firm employed celebrated artists of the era, including James E. Buttersworth, George Inness, Thomas Nast, and Eastman Johnson. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait specialized in sporting scenes; Louis Maurer handled genre scenes; George H. Durrie supplied winter scenes. Frances Flora Bond Palmer produced panoramas of the American landscape and was recognized as the first woman in the United States to earn her living as a full-time professional artist.

  Small works sold for five to twenty cents each. Large works ran one to three dollars. Distribution reached beyond the central New York shop through pushcart vendors, peddlers, bookstores, mail orders, and eventually a London office and agents across Europe.

• 5. The Darktown Comics

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  Among all the subjects Currier and Ives printed, the Darktown Comics were perennially among the bestsellers. Of approximately 500 comic prints the firm produced, according to Albert Baragwanath, more than half belonged to this series, whose humor depended on gross burlesque of African Americans. According to J. Michael Martinez, every single print in the Darktown Comics series was a bestseller. At least one sold 73,000 copies through pushcarts and country stores.

  Thomas Worth, one of the contributing artists, reworked a previous Statue of Liberty image into a Darktown Comics piece, substituting an African American woman resembling the mammy figure as the figure holding the torch. The firm was targeting middle-class white American buyers, and in doing so it built what one historian described as a pictorial record of 19th-century American values, racism included.

  When the firm was liquidated in 1907 and most of the lithographic stones were ground down and sold by the pound, some ending up as fill in Central Park, among the stones that survived intact was a small folio from the Darktown Comics series. The prints themselves remain readily available to view and purchase today.

• 6. Collecting and Legacy

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  Original Currier and Ives lithographs carry identifying characteristics that collectors use to distinguish them from reproductions. The earliest prints used cotton-based paper of medium to heavy weight. From around 1870, the firm switched to paper mixed with a small amount of wood pulp. Currier's inking process left a pattern of elongated splotches and dashes with occasional spots, a quality modern reproductions cannot replicate. Standard folio sizes, measured without borders or title text, remain another guide.

  The prints survived into popular culture in ways that outlasted the firm itself. Winter scenes became standard images for American Christmas cards. Currier and Ives is mentioned by name in the carol "Sleigh Ride." Catharine Esther Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, authors of the 1869 book American Woman's Home, named the firm's prints among the household decorations appropriate for a proper home.

  In 2019, a print of Across the Continent by Fanny Palmer sold at auction for over $60,000, a measure of how far the market for these images has traveled from the five-cent prints that once changed hands from pushcarts on city streets.