Currier & Ives Prints

About Currier & Ives

Currier & Ives was a New York print publisher that sold cheap hand-coloured lithographs to American households for most of the nineteenth century. Nathaniel Currier, born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1813, trained in a Boston lithography shop and set up on his own in New York in 1835 as N. Currier, Lithographer. His first successes were quick prints of news events such as city fires and steamboat disasters. In 1857 he made his bookkeeper, James Merritt Ives, a partner, and the firm took the name Currier & Ives. Ives helped choose what to publish and widened the list to sentimental and country subjects such as sleigh rides, farmsteads in snow and steamboat races. The firm issued at least 7,500 different images. Each was drawn by hand on limestone, printed in black and then coloured by teams of women, each adding one colour. Small prints sold for a few cents and large ones for one to three dollars, through pushcart sellers, shops, mail order and an office in London. Many of the winter scenes were copied from paintings by George Henry Durrie. The firm also published the Darktown Comics, a best-selling series of racist caricatures. It closed in 1907, and its winter views are still the image many Americans have of a nineteenth-century Christmas.