Currier & Ives

Currier & Ives was perhaps the most prolific and successful lithography publisher of the 19th century. Founded in 1835 by Nathaniel Currier, who was joined in 1854 by James Merritt Ives, the firm produced thousands of prints at their New York workshop, ranging from ephemeral black-and-white advertisements to large-scale, color display pieces.

Numerous artists worked for the firm during its 72-year existence, including the cartoonist Theodore Worth, the painter Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, and the printer Louis Maurer, who later co-founded his own commercial printing business, Heppenheimer & Mauer. But the individual whose legacy is most closely associated with the firm is Frances Flora Bond Palmer, who designed hundreds of images and trained and supervised the firm’s many colorists, illustrators, and printers.