Currier & Ives

The high-quality, hand-colored lithographs of American scenes by Currier & Ives are the images by which Americans and the world came to know the rapidly growing America of the last half of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Currier began his career as an apprentice lithographer in 1828. By the mid-1830's he established his own firm on Spruce Street in New York City. In 1857 James Ives became a partner in this flourishing business that produced more than 7,000 lithographs in half a century. Currier & Ives' enormous productivity was accompanied by consistently high standards of printing and hand-coloring — and by their ability to commission original works by many of the finest American genre painters of the era, including C.R. Parsons, Fanny Palmer, Louis Maurer, George Durrie and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait.