Currier & Ives began as a small printing shop on Broadway, but eventually produced some of the most famous pictures in American history.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
Eight-year-old Nathaniel Currier went to work to help his family in 1821, after his father died. His mother had four young children to support, so Nathaniel and his older brother did odd jobs in their hometown of Boston, Massachusetts, to make enough money to keep them all going. When he was 15, Nathaniel got an apprenticeship at a lithography shop near the family’s home. Lithography, a type of printing in which an image is created with a grease pencil on a smooth stone or metal plate and then pressed onto paper, was a relatively inexpensive way to print.
At 20, Currier set out on his own, first moving to Philadelphia to work with a printer and engraver there, and then heading to New York City and a job at a print shop owned by John Pendleton, the lithographer he’d apprenticed with as a teenager. Pendleton’s shop at 137 Broadway gave Currier the opportunity to hone his skills, and in 1834, when Pendleton decided to move back to Boston, he left the shop in the care of Currier.
DISASTERS ARE WORTH A FORTUNE
During the next decade, Currier moved his shop to Wall Street and continued making lithographs. He started experimenting with his own scenes, particularly images of contemporary disasters. In the days before TV news and photojournalism, images of the disasters people read about in newspapers—shipwrecks, fires, and explosions—were hot sellers because the papers didn’t include any images at all. Various printers would produce single scenes and sell them individually, and the first lithograph print Currier created himself was of the collapsed Planter’s Hotel in New Orleans. Customers to his print shop snatched them up. In 1840 he got a big break when one of his lithographs—of the sinking of a ship in New York Harbor—ran as a supplement in an issue of the New York Sun. Currier’s shop had to work nonstop for several months to print enough copies.
In 1852 Currier met a young man named James Merritt Ives, a New York bookkeeper who was friends with his youngest brother. Ives became Currier’s go-to guy: He kept the books, managed the shop’s finances, helped with the creative process, and made the production process more efficient. Within five years, Currier had made him a full partner. The printing company was renamed Currier & Ives.
Both Nathanial Currier and James Merritt Ives served as volunteer firemen in New York City.
PICTURES FOR THE PEOPLE
Around that time, the company also changed from a job press (one that took on jobs from outside clients) to a full-time print publisher of its own line of prints. Currier & Ives moved its operation one more time—to Spruce Street—and focused solely on producing artistic lithographs. The company had dozens of in-house artists who created images and were paid anywhere from a penny per print for a 3 ½ × 5-inch image to eight or ten cents for a larger one. Each image was pressed by hand, and there were no limits on print runs. So no one knows for sure how many prints Currier & Ives produced, but estimates run as high as one million…of about 7,500 different scenes.
The prints were marketed to average customers (“colored engravings for the people,” Currier & Ives called them), so that everyone had the opportunity to see the things they read about in newspapers and so they could have art to enjoy. Nathaniel Currier and James Ives even called themselves “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures.” The prints detailed everything from Civil War battles and presidential portraits to everyday life—fishing on the Harlem River, families at home, horse races, and landscapes, in color and in black and white. Small prints were affordable, selling for 20¢ each (or about $5 today). Large prints, though, could run as high as $5 (about $125 today), and these were often considered works of art.
Nathaniel Currier retired in 1880 and sold his shares to his son Edward. James Ives worked every day until he died in 1895; then his son Chauncey took over. Edward and Chauncey co-managed the company until 1902, when Edward Currier had to retire after contracting tuberculosis. Chauncey stayed on until 1907, when Currier & Ives officially closed. But the prints it made became collector’s items—today, creations made by those “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Pictures” sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars.
FAMOUS FINDS
During the more than 70 years it was in business, Currier & Ives employed some of the 19th century’s most famous artists. People like…
• Thomas Nast, who became a famous caricaturist and editorial cartoonist. Often called “the father of the American cartoon,” Nast created the symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties (the donkey and elephant, respectively) and is usually given credit for drawing the first modern image of Santa Claus.
• Eastman Johnson, known for his portraits of both everyday people (including some of the most famous images of slaves in the American South) and prominent Americans. He was also a cofounder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• George Inness, well known for his panoramic American landscapes.
• Frances (Fanny) Flora Palmer, who worked for Currier & Ives for 20 years and was known for creating panoramas of American landscapes. She’s generally called the most famous female American lithographer of her day.
• Napoleon Sarony, who became a famous photographer, shooting pictures of everyone from Mark Twain to General William Tecumseh Sherman. One of Sarony’s photographs of Sherman was used on an 1893 postage stamp.
• The first nursing home and hospital for retired seamen is on Staten Island—Sailors’ Snug Harbor opened in 1883.
• New York’s City Hall is the oldest city hall in the country still being used as a government center.
Most populous bird species in Central Park: the common grackle.