The Old Farm Gate

Currier & Ives|Frances Flora Bond Palmer

1864 · Hand-colored lithograph · Drawings and Prints

Beneath trees, and beside a stream, two boys push a wooden gate, as two girls stand on its rails. To the right, near a large black dog, a boy plays with a wagon and a girl kneels on the ground. Beyond the gate, at the back of a lawn is a white house with green shutters, chickens in the yard. At right, a dirt road leads to a distant town. When Frances "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer moved to New York from England in 1844 she was thirty-two and an accomplished artist and printmaker. Initially, Fanny and her husband Seymour operated a small print-shop in lower Manhattan, similar to one they had run in Leicester (United Kingdom). In 1849, the couple moved to Brooklyn after the business closed. Nathaniel Currier recognized Palmer’s talent and began to buy her drawings to use as print designs. After Currier & Ives was established in 1857 she became a staff artist. As a designer able to transfer images to lithographic stones for printing, Palmer produced more than 200 prints for the firm and today is regarded as a leading woman lithographer of the period.

Artist

Currier & Ives|Frances Flora Bond Palmer

Date

1864

Medium

Hand-colored lithograph

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of A. S. Colgate, 1952