Currier & Ives’ America: From a Young Nation to a Great Power

Collectibles

Rawls ★ currier & Ives’ America ★ from a Young Nation to a Great Power

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ver the last six decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of colorful Currier & Ives prints were circulated throughout the land, helping generations of Americans to visualize their country’s history in adventurous times—such as the opening of the West, the building of our great cities, the application of steam power to travel on land and sea, and the rapid introduction of electricity to city lighting and communications between cities. This skillfully produced volume, featuring more than three hundred full-color plates, offers a truly representative selection from the wide variety of prints issued by our country’s best-loved lithographers—its highly praised first edition is already an heirloom in many American families.

“A bountiful, beautiful offering of Americana. . . . Walton Rawls . . . has carried both the pictorial richness and the larger significance of Currier & Ives’ work to a definitive presentation.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Walton Rawls is the author of other celebrated books in the field of American popular culture, including Abbeville’s Great Civil War Heroes and Their Battles and Wake Up, America!: World War I and the American Poster. Trained in American history and literature at Harvard, he has contributed articles to American History Illustrated; Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society; and The Oxford Companion to American Military History. He lives in Atlanta and provided the informative preface for this new edition of the book that Imprint has named “a printer’s and an author’s masterpiece.”

“It is a remarkable book . . . an invaluable document in our social history.”

—Professor Henry Steele Commager, Amherst College

currier & Ives’ ives’

AMERICA

“Impossible to put down. Author Rawls’ text is a lively history of these remarkable illustrators.”

—Time “The most complete, most attractive book about Currier & Ives ever published. . . . A welcome acquisition for anyone who is interested in art, Americana, or a historical perspective of how Americans have perceived themselves and their nation.”

—Architectural Digest

Abbeville Press 116 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011 1-800-Artbook Available wherever fine books are sold Visit us at www.abbeville.com

from a

Young Nation to a

Great Power walton Rawls

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Nathaniel Currier (1813–1888) James M. Ives (1824–1895)

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CURRIER & IVES’

AMERICA FROM A

YOUNG NATION TO A

GREAT POWER

walton Rawls

Abbeville Press Publishers New York London

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For M.L.R., A.W.P., and A.H.R.

Front cover: The Harbor of New York / From the Brooklyn Bridge Tower.

Anonymous, undated.

Back cover: Winter Moonlight. F.F. Palmer, 1866.

For this edition Editor: Shannon Connors Proofreader: Ashley Benning Design: Misha Beletsky Composition: Michael Russem Production manager: Louise Kurtz All of the illustrations in this book, except one, come from the Harry T. Peters Collection, the world’s largest and finest assemblage of Currier & Ives lithographs. They are reproduced through the courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

Copyright © 2015, 1979 Abbeville Press. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Abbeville Press, 116 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011.

Printed in China.

A previous edition of this book was published under the title The Great Book of Currier & Ives’ America.

Second edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 978-0-7892-1258-0 Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

For bulk and premium sales and for text adoption procedures, write to Customer Service Manager, Abbeville Press, 116 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011 or call 1-800-Artbook.

Visit Abbeville Press online at www.abbeville.com.

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Contents

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“ he Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints” 19

Novus Ordo Seclorum (“A New Era is Born”) 65

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“ roud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad extravagant city!” 109

“

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How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood” 157 11/13/15 4:14 PM

Our manifest destiny to overspread the continent

“. . .

allotted by Providence” 197

Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home” 241

“

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“ hou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!

Sail on, O Union, strong and great!” 281

Go forth, under the open sky, and list to Nature’s teachings.” 325

“

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America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography

“. . .

dazzles the imagination” 365

Never was such horseflesh as in those days on

“

Long Island or in the City” 405

Ev’ry prospect pleases, and only man is vile” 449

“. . .

IND EX 485 AC KNOWLED G MENT S 488 BIBLIOG RAPH Y 488

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CURRIER & IVES’ AMERICA

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“The Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints”

(ESTA BLISHED 1834)

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Broadway New York. Currier & Ives, undated. Looking south from City Hall Park.

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any an afternoon in the 1850s, tall, slim Nathaniel Currier might look up from the high desk at the rear of his bustling print emporium and nod to Congregationalist minister Henry Ward Beecher as he thumbed through the latest religious and temperance pictures.

This abolitionist firebrand was often in the company of another strong-­minded antislavery–­antidrink spokesman, Horace Greeley, editor and founder of the nearby New York Tribune. Although they intermittently hectored Currier to produce antislavery prints for their consuming cause, his earlier venture into this partisan fray (“Branding Slaves on the Coast of Africa Previous to Embarkation”) had convinced him that a smart businessman avoids taking sides—­his numerous customers in the slaveholding South were too valuable to risk alienating.

Glancing past these two warhorses, Currier might also greet several other regular customers leafing through prints in the well-­stocked bins lining his walls, the upper reaches of which displayed oil

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ABOVE: Currier & Ives retail shop, 115 Nassau Street, about 1884. Daniel W. Logan, Sr., sales manager, on right.

RIGHT: Grand National Democratic Banner.

Nathaniel Currier, 1844. The first political banner.

paintings he had bought to reproduce as lithographs—­­all now marked with price tags for quick sale.

Through the front door of his shop at the corner of Nassau and Spruce streets, Nat could see New York’s handsome City Hall, and he was quite pleased to be so close to the center of America’s largest and busiest city, a burgeoning metropolis with a population well over half-­a-­million at mid-­century.

Currier’s advertisements stressed that his store was “nearly opposite City Hall,” and if he walked to its front entrance, past the crowds standing at the center tables stacked with lithographs of every sort (hand-­colored but also available plain), past additional tables on the sidewalk piled with “Cheap and Popular” prints bearing his “N. Currier, Lith.” imprint (“20 cents each, or six for $1.00”), he was within a few steps of the pleasant park in front of City Hall known as the Common. Nassau Street, onto which Currier’s store opened, had linked the Common and the oldest part of the city since the late-­seventeenth century and was one of the streets named to honor Dutch prince William of Orange-­ Nassau, who with his wife Mary, daughter of James II, ascended the throne of England in 1689.

Along the opposite side of the park was Broadway, a much grander avenue, where, three doors north of venerable St. Paul’s Chapel, stood the former residence of John Jacob Astor (at his death in 1848 the richest man in America). To the south, where City Hall park came to a point at Broadway and Ann Street, was the fabulous American Museum, under the entrepreneurship of showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, Currier’s great friend and sometime collaborator. Back to the north on Broadway, near Grand Street, was Mechanics’ Hall, where the snappy Christy’s Minstrels had been playing for years; and if there were ever two things impressionable visitors to New York would never miss, they were the minstrels and Barnum’s extravaganza (later billed as “The Peerless Prodigies of Physical Phenomena and Great Presentation of Marvelous Living Human Curiosities”). On Fulton, the next

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street behind the Barnum museum, were the showroom and workshops of another of Nat’s friends, Duncan Phyfe, the city’s premier furniture-­maker. The Scotsman Phyfe had made a substantial success of himself in his adopted city, just as the Massachusetts-­born Currier had.

It was a great time to be alive (and in business), for it seemed that hardly a month passed that a wily New Yorker did not invent or perfect something that would amaze the Old World and radically change life in the New World—­­or that some intriguing disaster suitable for one of Currier’s “rush prints” did not befall the city’s many inhabitants. Nat could also number himself among the innovators: his disaster prints, rushed out within days of a bloody catastrophe (and showing its every gory aspect), were the world’s first illustrated news “extras”; he also liked to take credit for originating the “political banner,” a vote-­getting necessity in all future elections. This colorful type of print featured inspiring portraits of a party’s candidates, its slogan, and a few surefire symbols like the American eagle and arrays of Stars and Stripes.

Also on Fulton Street (formerly Partition, but renamed for the New York inventor of the practical steamboat), at the corner of Broadway, was the prosperous establishment of another well-­known innovator—­whose latest line of work was destined to hasten the eventual demise of commercial lithography. Of course Nat Currier did not dream that the achievements of Mathew B. Brady with the newly invented photograph would have this melancholy effect, any more than he anticipated the ultimate success of experiments by other lithographers in applying color to a print mechanically while printing it, rather than coloring it later by hand—­as had been done so beautifully in his factory for more than twenty years. Nathaniel Currier, the most successful lithographer and printseller in the entire

Ruins of the Planters Hotel, New-­Orleans. Nathaniel Currier, 1835. (J. H. Bufford).

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Burning of the New York Crystal Palace, on Tuesday, Oct. 5th 1858.

Currier & Ives, undated.

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millions of cheaper album cards, Christmas cards, condolence cards, puzzles, games, juvenile books, mottoes, trade cards, calendars, and posters. The Currier & Ives company did not fare that well.

VII

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n 1872, Currier & Ives gave up its retail shop of thirty-­four-­years’ duration for smaller quarters at 125 Nassau Street. Two years later, the firm had moved into 123 Nassau, and, three years after that, in 1877, it was operating out of 115 Nassau, where it remained for another seventeen years.

In 1880, Nathaniel Currier, then sixty-­seven years old, retired from the famous company founded by him nearly fifty years earlier. The prosperous half-­century he had spent in lithography also had been a period of fantastic development and change for the hundred-­year-­old American republic. Its westernmost frontier had moved in that time from the Missouri River all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The population of a still-­g rowing America had more than tripled—­from fifteen million to fifty million.

New York, the nation’s largest city, had burgeoned from 300,000 to 1,200,000 inhabitants. To reach the Pacific coast shortly after Currier opened his shop was a journey that consumed months, whether by prairie schooner across the Great Plains or, in the 1850s, by noble clipper ship around the Horn; in 1880 it took only six days by transcontinental railroad. Up to 1835, there had been no such thing as illustrated news; no quick way for the man in the street to grasp the horror of a distant catastrophe; no way that the urban mechanic could easily picture what a buffalo looked like (or a Mississippi River sidewheel steamboat); no way for a matron of modest circumstances to afford a colorful print for her parlor; no easy way for a Middle Border schoolmarm to help her pupils visualize the exciting events of our nation’s founding. However, Nathaniel Currier had a hand in changing all of that.

“Old Hickory” was still President when Currier launched his series of “Cheap and Popular” prints—­ the first colorful and artistic pictures a Jacksonian “common man” could ever afford to own. The simple nature and wide variety of these prints over the years incidentally schooled our citizens in what it meant to be American. Currier’s dramatic historical pictures brought to life for everyone the stirring highlights of America’s proud beginnings (as well as contemporary battles of the Mexican and Civil wars). His innovative political banners effectively met the widespread public’s need to know what its leading presidential candidates looked like, and the company’s topical cartoons offered (as they were advertised) a democratic selection of “hits at the weak points of all the candidates, policies and parties.” The many city and landscape views issued by Currier & Ives presented Americans with a wide-­ ranging panorama of the manmade and natural wonders of their remarkable country; and the clipper ship, locomotive, steamship, and yacht prints testified to the American genius for inventing and perfecting, and to their love of speed. There were also bucolic scenes of planting and harvest, reminding the harried city-­dweller of man’s natural (and more perfect?) state; as well as provocative prints of Barnum freaks and notorious entertainers like Lola Montez, tempting the bumpkins to visit the “sinful” city; and “Comic Colored Pictures” that would “drive away the blues, and promote health by hearty and wholesome laughter.” The sportsman or armchair adventurer was treated to sylvan scenes of comradeship and hunting in the Adirondacks, to jolly fishing trips on Long Island Sound, to prints of important horse races and other sporting events, and to the romance of panning gold in the Sierra Nevada and of following our westward expansion through lands roamed by wild Indians and buffalo.

The ladies were offered a wide selection of tasteful flower and fruit pictures to ornament the dining room, and awesome landscapes for the parlor; they were kept abreast of the latest styles on Fifth Ave-

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The Odd-­Fellows Chart. Currier & Ives, 1887. Typical of the certificates and posters designed and lithographed by the firm for various organizations.

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nue by fashion plates, and had their moral sensibilities touched by a steady outpouring of religious and temperance prints and by gentle scenes that called to mind their innocent childhoods.

Nathaniel Currier had retired at a time when there was yet some justification in the boast that Currier & Ives’s “Celebrated Mammoth Catalogue” offered “The Best, the Cheapest, and the Most Popular Pictures in the World.” Although undated, this catalog was issued from the 115 Nassau Street address of 1877 to 1894, and it still presented a grand total of 1,412 different prints. There are later catalogs bearing the company’s next address, 108 Fulton Street, but by then the swell of popular demand that Currier & Ives had ridden so skillfully was well past its crest. Even at the peak of the firm’s success, a wave of the future was building rapidly, a wave that eventually washed away the old underpinnings of the hand-­colored lithograph. It was not a tidal wave that arrived without warning; its signs were clearly visible for a long time. Currier had had them pointed out more than once, but perhaps most poignantly in an incident reported to Harry T. Peters by Ives’s son Chauncey. One day in the 1860s, Currier’s old friend P. T. Barnum strode into 152 Nassau Street with the midget Tom Thumb perched on his shoulder, a sure way to attract the public’s attention. Barnum was there to discuss a new lithographed portrait of his tiny sideshow attraction to use in promotion. In the middle of the conversation, Thumb interrupted: “Barnum,” he said, “I have a better idea. Let’s go uptown to Sarony’s, and I’ll pose for a photo. He does all the big boys, and these old lithos are out of date.”

Indeed, during the late 1860s photographic portraits by Mathew Brady, Napoleon Sarony, and others had become a social necessity, and a collecting mania for carte-­de-­visite photographs of the famous was well underway. At his death in 1896, Napoleon Sarony, the most fashionable portraitist of the time, left a collection of 40,000 photographs of actors and actresses, not to mention 170,000 portraits of notables in other fields. Earlier, in the 1850s, another exciting invention of growing popularity had entered the market, a device that caused especially paired photographs to appear in three dimensions when viewed through its eyepiece. By 1863, one firm, E. & H. T. Anthony & Company, offered more than 1,100 examples of America’s famous sights and natural wonders for viewing by stereoscope, or stereopticon. Also in the 1850s, lively illustrated periodicals began to appear with wood-­engravings more timely, more numerous, and more skillfully done than ever before—­magazines like Harper’s and Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-­Room Companion and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. The significant advantages still held for a time by Currier & Ives prints in portraiture, scenic views, and pictorial coverage of the news were their vivid coloring and low price. However, these final attractions were greatly diminished by the perfecting of chromolithography in the 1860s and rapid improvements in steam-­powered printing, which by 1871 had brought forth a press capable of 1,800 impressions per hour.

VIII

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n November 20, 1888, seventy-­five-­year-­old Nathaniel Currier succumbed to heart disease at his home, 28 West 27th Street, in New York City. His place in the business had been filled in 1880 by his son Edward West Currier, who was trained as a lawyer. James Merritt Ives died, at the age of seventy-­one, on January 3, 1895, at his home in Rye, New York. His remains were taken to Brooklyn for burial in Green-­Wood Cemetery, where his former business partner had been interred seven years earlier. Chauncey Ives assumed his father’s role at the old firm, and in 1896 its retail shop was closed and its main office moved into the factory building on Spruce Street. The last-­known

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dated prints with the famous Currier & Ives imprint were issued in 1898 and covered events of the Spanish-­American War. By 1902, the firm’s activities were consolidated on but one floor of the factory building, and Edward West Currier had transferred his interests in the company to Chauncey Ives.

In 1907, after a period of too gradually reducing the company’s inventory of lithographs, Chauncey Ives sold the business to Daniel W. Logan, Jr., son of the firm’s long-­term sales manager. Later in that same year, Logan disposed of the remaining prints by the bundle, the stones by the pound, and dismantled the outmoded equipment that once had produced America’s Best, Cheapest, and Most Popular Pictures!

Currier & Ives, 1875. One of many signs produced for retail stores.

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Novus Ordo Seclorum (“A New Era is Born”)

GREAT SEAL OF THE UNITED STATES

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The Progress of the Century. / The Lightning Steam Press. The Electric Telegraph.

The Locomotive. The Steamboat. Currier & Ives, 1876.

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n that very day in 1776 when America was declared free and independent of Great Britain, Congress saw the need for a “Great Seal” with which to authenticate its official documents. However, not until June 20, 1782, did Congress finally settle on the two-­sided design that has served unaltered to this time.

On its face, the Great Seal displays a distinctly American bald eagle, victor over Ben Franklin’s candidate, the wild turkey, as our national symbol. The wings of this proud bird are outspread, and a floating streamer that bears the motto E Pluribus Unum (“From the many—­one”) is caught in its beak. The other side of the seal features a more mysterious, hardly American symbol: a truncated pyramid capped with a single eye set in a nimbused triangle. Above this is the motto Annuit Coeptis (“He [God] has smiled on our undertakings”). Below the pyramid is another motto, Novus Ordo Seclorum (“A new cycle of the ages”), by which Congress meant to proclaim the beginning of a glorious era for mankind.

The Founding Fathers thus identified on two sides of

the Great Seal themes that would be central to the American experience even well past the middle of the following century. On the political side of life, the determination of just how the “many” states were to become—­and remain—­ “one” nation was the root issue of all Congressional debate, action, and compromise up through its bloody resolution at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. On the social side, the idea was all-­ pervasive that God indeed had smiled on Americans, having provided for these errant descendants of Adam and Eve a virtually unpopulated continent, with limitless resources, upon which to make a fresh start in life. Lyman Beecher voiced this feeling in The Memory of Our Fathers (1826): “If it had been the design of Heaven to establish a powerful nation in the full enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, where all the energies of man might find full scope and excitement on purpose to show the world by one great successful experiment of what man is capable . . . —­where could such an experiment have been made but in this country!”

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Col. Theodore Roosevelt, U. S. V. / Commander of the Famous Rough Riders. Currier & Ives, 1898.

The last known portrait to bear the Currier & Ives imprint.

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Wm. P. Dewees, M.D. Nathaniel Currier, 1834.

(M. E. D. Brown, after John Neagle) The earliest known portrait or print bearing the Nathaniel Currier imprint.

t was such themes that contemporaries of Nathaniel Currier and James Ives wrestled with and responded to. The idea that God had ordained the founding of this country lent a sanctity to the stirring events of its early history and led to the near apotheosis of key figures such as George Washington, whom General Henry Lee had characterized for all time as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” The year following Washington’s death in 1799, Parson Mason Weems, rector of Mt. Vernon parish, brought out the immensely popular Life of George Washington that launched the mythologizing of our first president as a man of unparalled honesty and wisdom. It was not, however, until the fifth augmented edition (1806) that young George took full responsibility for felling the legendary cherry tree: “Father, I cannot tell a lie.” The title page of the “Ninth edition . . . Greatly improved” suggests the following lesson to its readers: A life how useful to his country led!

How loved! while living! how revered! now dead!

Lisp! lisp! his name, ye children yet unborn!

And with like deeds your own great names adorn.

Although in 1839 Jared Sparks published a somewhat less moralistic life of Washington, the beatified image was irrevocably set in the American mind. By the time Washington Irving issued his carefully researched five-­volume biography (published over the years 1855 to 1859), Currier & Ives already had begun reverently commemorating events in the life of President Washington that if not precisely historical were at least well known to all Americans.

Nathaniel Currier’s imagined deathbed scene of 1846 was among the earliest of these popular lithographs of Washington, but eventually his stately likeness would appear in more than one hundred prints, the greatest number devoted to any historical figure.

Over the years, Currier & Ives published more than five hundred portraits, encompassing all of the American presidents up to Grover Cleveland and practically every national figure from the Revolution on. In the early 1840s, Nathaniel Currier began issuing a uniform series of the presidents’ portraits based on Gilbert Stuart’s paintings from life of the first five. All of the great chief executives except Washington had survived into Currier’s lifetime, and his contemporaries saw something almost mystical in

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the deaths of John Adams at ninety and Thomas Jefferson at eighty-­three on precisely the same day—­July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of their signing the Declaration of Independence.

After Washington, the next most frequently portrayed president was Abraham Lincoln. Currier & Ives depicted him more than thirty times. Besides the usual portraits, alone and with his family, Lincoln figured—­not always flatteringly—­in numerous political cartoons, beginning with the 1860 presidential campaign. And, of course, after April 14, 1865, Currier & Ives issued prints showing Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater, his final moments in the rooming house opposite, and scenes of his solemn funeral procession.

Anyone in the news was deemed worthy of a Currier & Ives portrait: from the exceedingly popular minister Henry Ward Beecher (“Be generous with beauty”), who was subjected to a trial for adultery with one of his parishioners; to the eighteen-­year-­old Prince of Wales (years away from becoming King Edward VII), a visitor to America in the fall of 1860. Currier & Ives not only issued Bertie’s picture but added to the stock of depictions of his mother, Queen Victoria, and the rest of the royal family. That same year also brought one of the most unusual delegations of foreign worthies ever to visit this young country. Dressed in somber robes of rich fabrics, their slick, black hair done up in topknots, and with two long, elaborately lacquered swords stuck in their silken belts, the noble ambassadors of the emperor of Japan caused sensations wherever they visited. Here in connection with commercial ties initiated by Commodore Perry’s expedition to Japan in 1853 and 1854, they were squired around by a personage who achieved a good bit of admiration in his own right: “Tommy—­Tateish Onejero, Interpreter to the Japanese Embassy,” as the Currier & Ives portrait identified him.

In preparation for the centennial of America’s independence, Currier & Ives began to fill in gaps in pictorial coverage of this nation’s history. For instance, the company had neglected earlier to depict Columbus’s discovery of the New World, or even the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, but these and similar oversights were rectified in 1876—­often in multiple versions. Back in the 1840s, Nathaniel Currier already had prepared lithographs of many notable events in our history; among them were the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, and Washington crossing the Delaware before the Battle of Trenton. Several of these historical prints were based on paintings by artists such as Benjamin West, John Trumbull, and, in the case of the Delaware crossing, Emanuel Leutze, but others originated in the Currier shop. Although a number of these early pictures remained in stock or were reprinted from extant stones, at least one had to be redone in deference to the growing strength of the temperance movement and the unblemished character of George Washington. The poignant scene at Fraunces Tavern in New York, when Washington took leave of his officers at the end of the Revolution, was altered to remove

a decanter of wine from the table and a glass of the iniquitous liquid from the general’s hand.

Eventually Currier & Ives were to offer more than two hundred-­fifty prints depicting the highpoints of American history, but of the events pictured in this section most are so well known as to require no comment or interpretation. Perhaps only “Death of Tecumseh, Battle of the Thames, Oct. 18, 1813” necessitates any background information for its full appreciation. Tecumseh was the Shawnee leader of an Indian confederacy formed to oppose the white man’s depredations on Indian tribal lands supposedly reserved to them by sacred treaty. In the War of 1812, the Indians, having allied themselves with British forces based in Canada, had retreated with them following Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie (“We have met the enemy and they are ours.”). Pursued by Colonel Richard M. Johnson’s cavalry troop of Kentucky volunteers, the Indians decided to make a stand on the banks of the Thames River. In the battle that ensued, Colonel Johnson, a former “war hawk” congressman from Kentucky, struck the fatal blow against Tecumseh that was to insure his subsequent political success in a country that rewards its military heroes with high office. By the time this print was issued in 1846, Colonel Johnson had become a senator and ultimately vice president under Martin Van Buren, having waged the close-­fought campaign of 1836 under this stirring battle cry: Rumpsey dumpsey, rumpsey dumpsey, Colonel Johnson killed Tecumseh!

The leading artist-­lithographer of Currier’s early historical prints was Napoleon Sarony. He is credited with doing “Wm. Penn’s Treaty with the Indians . . .” and “Perry’s Victory on Lake Erie,” but his touch is also apparent in several of the other, anonymous, lithographs. Born in Quebec, Canada, of mixed Austrian and French parentage, he came to New York as an apprentice to a popular French artist named Robertson. Later he began to do work for Nathaniel Currier and collaborated with W. K. Hewitt on Currier’s first great success, “Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat LEXINGTON. . . .” When he was twenty-­five, he left to open a rival lithography business with another former Currier employee, Henry B. Major.

Successful from the start, Sarony & Major achieved a lasting reputation in 1855 with their illustrations to the official four-­volume history of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s expedition to open trade with Japan. Soon wealthy enough to retire, Sarony sold his part of the business and departed for Europe. While there, he learned the art of photography at his brother’s establishment in Scarborough, England. After a period of operating his own studio in Birmingham, Sarony returned to New York to merchandise two of his brother’s photographic inventions: a head-­holder for the long exposures required in those days, and a new type of photographic paper. Eventually, Sarony set himself up again as a photographer, at 680 Broadway,

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The Assassination of President Lincoln, / At Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., April 14th 1865. Currier & Ives, 1865.

and quickly became the city’s premier theatrical and society portraitist. Barely five feet tall, he cut a dramatic figure in his customary high boots, fur caps, and military-­cut tunics and capes. His flair for histrionics also extended to his portraiture, and he introduced a new drama to posing, a greater variety in backgrounds and props, and a fresh sensitivity to lighting and shadow in studio photographs.

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n the early 1850s, when New York’s busy East River piers were the principal embarkation point of the Gold Rush to California, it was impossible to ignore the dozens of sleek, black-­hulled clipper ships tied up temporarily alongside the South Street piers. Their soaring masts and rigging—­taller than anything but church steeples—­fringed all vistas to the east, like a forest on the other side of a clearing. Along South Street, at water’s edge, one could walk directly beneath rows of salty figureheads, gilt-­worked cutwaters, and tapered bowsprits that, jutting out from long, concave bows, threatened the top windows of ship chandleries and seamen’s taverns lining the waterfront. To the west one could see only tips of

stubby, vestigial masts belonging to steamboats tied up at Hudson River piers, but from anywhere along lower Broadway there was an unobstructed view to the south.

Down past Bowling Green, past the Battery, past the old harbor fort on Governor’s Island one could see clear out to the Narrows, where billowing tiers of once-­white sails beat out to open ocean and swift passage round the Horn to California, the Hawaiian Islands, and the legendary treaty ports of distant China.

The numerous shipping-­line offices were all congregated around the intersection of Pearl and Wall streets, not too far from Nathaniel Currier’s shop. Perhaps Nat even lithographed some of the colorful handouts, or clipper cards, by which a ship’s imminent departure was announced. Following the initial, frenzied rush to California in 1849, when there were more than enough passengers for every seaworthy ship, competition for the gold-­seekers increased as newly built clippers sailed into the harbor from shipyards all up and down the Atlantic coast.

Although ship owners traditionally had paintings of their vessels done to hang in company offices, some shipping-­ line managers soon learned that inexpensive lithographs of their handsome clippers made excellent business gifts

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Death of President Lincoln. / The Nation’s Martyr. Currier & Ives, undated.

that helped spread the reputation of a particular ship—­an important factor given the growing number of sharp clippers on which to book passage.

Nathaniel Currier was quick to see the market among the general public for marine lithographs, and in a few years he had hand-­colored depictions of some seventy-­five fine clippers in stock. The sleek lines of a number of these famous ships were taken from paintings by one of the leading nautical artists of the period, James E. Butterworth.

Among his subjects were the clippers Flying Cloud, Great Republic, Dreadnought (“Off Sandy Hook”), Nightingale, Racer, and Sweepstakes. Butterworth seems to have inherited his interest in the sea from his father James C. Buttersworth (James E. dropped the “s”), who had served as an artist and draftsman on the staff of British admiral Horatio Lord Nelson. Born on the Isle of Wight, young James emigrated to this country when he was about twenty-­five, settling in West Hoboken, New Jersey, to earn his living as a painter of marine subjects.

Many of Currier’s clipper ship prints were lithographed by another Englishman, Charles Parsons, who had been brought to America by his parents when he was nine years old. At the age of twelve, he began his apprenticeship with

Endicott & Company, one of New York’s leading lithographers, where he remained for thirty years before joining Harper & Brothers as head of the art department. Parsons was never directly employed by Currier & Ives, but as that company expanded it was often necessary to farm out work to the Endicott firm, perhaps with the understanding that Parsons would do the lithographing since he was the “delineator” of so many Currier & Ives prints. His contributions include not only the marines, but also railroad, firefighting, hunting, and fishing scenes, as well as the popular “Central Park—­Winter, The Skating Pond.”

One fine print that was the joint effort of Butterworth and Parsons is “Clipper Ship Nightingale, Getting Under Weigh Off the Battery, New York.” Nightingale was launched on June 16, 1851, and provided luxurious accommodations for 250 passengers beneath her 185-­foot-­long deck. The clipper had been named for the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, and her bust served as the ship’s figurehead.

Miss Lind, of whom Felix Mendelssohn had said: “There will not be born, in a whole century, another being so gifted as she,” had made her spectacular American debut in September, 1850, at Castle Garden, the circular structure shown on the shoreline of Manhattan.

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Anonymous

TH E H AR BO R OF NE W YORK/FROM THE BROOKLY N B RI D GE TOWE R

C u r r ier & I ves , u n dated

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TH E G RE AT EA ST RIVER SUSPEN SI ON B RI D GE

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N E W YORK CRY STA L PA L ACE

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B LAC K WE LL ’ S ISLA ND, EA ST RI VER

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Eastman Johnson

HUSKING

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(Courtesy Her

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esy Heritage Pl antation of Sandwich, Mass.) Currier & Ives, 1861

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Anonymous

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BOUND DOWN THE RIVER

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Currier & Ives, 1870

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H . D. Ma nnin g / F. F. Palme r

A M I DN IG HT RACE ON THE MI SSI SSI P P I

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G OL D M INING IN CA LIF ORN I A

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Anonymou s Nat haniel Currier, 1846

IN MEMORY OF __________________

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PE ACE BE TO THIS HO U SE

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S PRING FLOWERS

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Anonymou s Nathaniel Currier, undated

T HE ART OF MA KING MONEY PLENTY

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Anonymous

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THE DREAMS OF YOUTH

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A nonymous

H UG ME CLOSER, GEORGE!

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Index TO THE PRINTS A ND THE TOPICS Across the Continent / “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” 225 Adam and Eve Driven out of Paradise, 469 Advertisements, 43, 46, 52, 53, 59, 436–37, 475 Age of Brass, The / Or the Triumphs of Woman’s Rights, 457 Age of Iron, The / Man as he expects to be, 458‒59 Ambuscade, The, 390 American Country Life. May Morning, 137 American Country Life / October Afternoon, 253 American Country Life. Summer’s Evening, 184 American Express Train, 235 American Farm Scenes. / No. 1, 179 American Farm Scenes. No. 4, 56 American Feathered Game / Mallard and Canvas Back Ducks, 338 American Feathered Game / Partridges, 339 American Field Sports / “Flush’d,” 342 American Field Sports / “On a Point,” 343 American Fireman, The, Always Ready, 154 American Fireman, The, Facing the Enemy, 155 American Forest Scene / Maple Sugaring, 190‒91 American Homestead Winter, 255 American National Game of Base Ball, The, 440 American Railroad Scene/Snow Bound, 236‒37 American Railway Scene, An, at Hornellsville, Erie Railway, 239 American Steamboats on the Hudson / Passing the Highlands, 72 American Whalers Crushed in the Ice / “Burning the Wrecks to Avoid Danger to other Vessels,” 363 American Winter Scenes / Morning, 394 American Winter Sports / Deer Shooting “on the Shattagee,” 345 American Winter Sports / Trout Fishing “on Chateaugay Lake,” 356‒57 Animals and birds, 167, 174, 175, 176‒77, 178, 199, 326, 327, 338, 339, 342, 343, 346, 351, 474 Anxious Moment, An / “A three pounder sure,” 355 Arguing the Point, 300‒301 Arkansas Traveller, The / Scene in the Back Woods of Arkansas, 203 Art Gallery / Grand United States Centennial Exhibition, 1876, 387

Art of Making Money Plenty, The, 279 Assassination of President Lincoln, The, / At Ford’s Theatre, Washington, D.C., April 14th 1865, 68 Attack on the “Home Guard,” The, 318‒19 Autumn Fruits, 276 Autumn in New England / Cider Making, 187 Awful Conflagration of the Steamboat LEXINGTON In Long Island Sound, 24 Bad Man at the Hour Of Death, The, 455 Bark “Theoxena,” The, 100 Barnum prints, 19, 113, 114, 115, 121, 122 Baseball, 286, 440 Battle at Bunker’s Hill, 83 Battle of Chattanooga, Tenn., The, Nov. 24th & 25th 1863, 314 Battle of Fair Oaks, Va., The, May 31st 1862, 311 Battle of Jonesboro, Georgia, The, Sept. 1st, 1864, 316 Battle of Resaca de la Palma, May 9th 1846, 294 Battle of Spottsylvania, Va., The, May 12th 1864, 315 Beach Snipe Shooting, 351 Belle of the West, The, 146 Bending her Beau!, 438 Benjamin Franklin / Statesman and Philosopher, 81 Billiards—“Froze Together,” 241 Birth Certificate, 242 Black Bass Spearing / on the Restigouche, New Brunswick, 360 Blackwell’s Island, East River, 129 Bloomer Costume, The, 461 Bombardment and Capture of Island “Number Ten,” 307 Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor, 303 Bound Down the River, 220‒21 Boxing, 432, 433, 434, 435 Breadth of Fashion, The / 5th Avenue, 462 Brer Thuldy’s Statue, Liberty Frightenin de World, 43 Broadway New York, 19 Brook Trout Fishing, 329 Brook Trout—Just Caught, 359 Buffalo Bull, Chasing Back. / “Turn About Is Fair Play,” 199 Burning Glass, The, 171 Burning of the New York Crystal Palace, on Tuesday, Oct. 5th 1858, 29 Burning of the Palace Steamer “Robert E. Lee,” 26 Camping in the Woods / A Good Time Coming, 325

Camping in the Woods / “Laying Off,” 334‒35 Capitol at Washington, The, 369 Catalogs, 410 Catalogue of Large and Fine Pictures in Colors, 410 Catching a Trout / “We hab you now, Sar!” 353 Caught on the Fly, 358 Celebrated “Four in Hand” Stallion Team, The, 138‒39 Celebrated Horse Lexington, The, 417 Central Park, The Lake, 112 Central-Park, Winter / The Skating Pond, 134‒35 Central Park in Winter, 397 Certificates, 61, 242, 243, 288, 452 Champion Slugger, The / “Knocking ’em out,” 434 Champions of the Mississippi, The / “A Race for the Buckhorns,” 216 Changed Man, A, 52 Charles Rowell / The Celebrated Pedestrian, 439 Chatham Square, New York, 109 Check, A. “Keep Your Distance!”

230 Chicago, as it was, 367 Children, 157, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 185, 263, 313. 390 Chinese Junk “Keying,” The, 149 Cigar store cards, 46 City Hall and Vicinity, 111 Civil War, 159, 281, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308‒9, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318‒19 Clipper Ship “Comet” of New York, 97 Clipper Ship “Dreadnought” off Tuskar Light, 98 Clipper Ship “Flying Cloud,” 70 Clipper Ship “Great Republic,” 99 Clipper Ship “Nightingale,” 96 Clipper ships, 70, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 442 Clipper Yacht “America” of New York, The, 442 Close Quarters, 346 Col. Theodore Roosevelt, U.S.V. / Commander of the Famous Rough Riders, 66 Comics, 43, 150, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 344, 449, 477, 478‒79, 484 Cornwallis is Taken!, 74 Cotton Plantation on the Mississippi, A, 192 “Crack Trotter” in the Harness of the Period, A, 422 Cream of Love, The, 475 Danger Signal, The, 58 Darling, I am Growing Old, 158 Death of Genl. Z. Taylor / 12th President of the United States, 298

Death of President Lincoln / The Nation’s Martyr, 69 Death of Tecumseh / Battle of the Thames Oct. 18, 1813, 91 Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor, The, 82 Disasters, 21, 23, 24, 26,28‒ 29, 36, 37, 49, 204 Disputed Heat, A / Claiming a Foul!, 424 Dr. William Valentine, in some of his Eccentric Characters, 30 Dreams of Youth, The, 482‒83 Drunkard’s Progress, The / From the First Glass to the Grave, 467 Early Winter, 388‒89 E. Forrest as Metamora, 142 1876—On Guard / “Unceasing Vigilance is the Price of Liberty,” 321 Electric Light, The / Thomas Edison and C. F. Brush, 107 Ellen, 465 English Snipe, 326 Enoch Arden—The Lonely Isle, 401 Entertainment and theater, 30, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 142, 144, 146, 147, 370 Entrance to the Highlands, The / Hudson River Looking South, 382‒83 Ethan Allen and Mate and Dexter— / in their Wonderful Race, over the Fashion Course, L. I., June 21st 1867, 411 Express Train, The, 234 Fairmount Water Works / Philadelphia, 386 Fall of Richmond Va., The, on the Night of April 2nd, 1865, 317 Falls of Niagara, The / “From the Canada Side,” 373 Family Register, 243 Fanny Elssler / In the Favorite Dance / La Cachuca, 118 Farmer’s Home, The—Harvest, 251 Farm life, 56, 57, 137, 167, 179, 180, 181, 182‒83, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 249, 251, 253, 255, 262, 393, 395, 398 Fashion, 133, 146, 460, 461, 462, 463 Fashionable “Turn-outs” in Central Park, 133 Fast Trotters on Harlem Lane, N.Y., 136 Father’s Pride, 162 Favorite Cat, The, 174 Feminism, 457, 458‒59 Firefighting, 123, 151, 152‒53, 154, 155, 366 First Appearance of Jenny Lind in America, 144 First Bird of the Season, The, 344 First Smoke, The / All Wrong, 159 First Trot of the Season, The / “Free for all Horses to go as they please,” 413

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American Art /Antiques & Collectibles

Rawls

currier

&

Ives’ america

★ currier & Ives’ America ★

rrie currie & I

from a Young Nation to a Great Power

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ver the last six decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of colorful Currier & Ives prints were circulated throughout the land, helping generations of Americans to visualize their country’s history in adventurous times—such as the opening of the West, the building of our great cities, the application of steam power to travel on land and sea, and the rapid introduction of electricity to city lighting and communications between cities. This skillfully produced volume, featuring more than three hundred full-color plates, offers a truly representative selection from the wide variety of prints issued by our country’s best-loved lithographers—its highly praised first edition is already an heirloom in many American families.

“A bountiful, beautiful offering of Americana. . . . Walton Rawls . . . has carried both the pictorial richness and the larger significance of Currier & Ives’ work to a definitive presentation.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Walton Rawls is the author of other celebrated books in the field of American popular culture, including Abbeville’s Great Civil War Heroes and Their Battles and Wake Up, America!: World War I and the American Poster. Trained in American history and literature at Harvard, he has contributed articles to American History Illustrated; Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society; and The Oxford Companion to American Military History. He lives in Atlanta and provided the informative preface for this new edition of the book that Imprint has named “a printer’s and an author’s masterpiece.”

“It is a remarkable book . . . an invaluable document in our social history.”

—Professor Henry Steele Commager, Amherst College

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“Impossible to put down. Author Rawls’ text is a lively history of these remarkable illustrators.”

—Time “The most complete, most attractive book about Currier & Ives ever published. . . . A welcome acquisition for anyone who is interested in art, Americana, or a historical perspective of how Americans have perceived themselves and their nation.”

—Architectural Digest

Abbeville Press 116 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10011 1-800-Artbook Available wherever fine books are sold Visit us at www.abbeville.com

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