My Cottage Home

Currier & Ives|Frances Flora Bond Palmer

1866 · Hand-colored lithograph · Drawings and Prints

In this rural scene, a woman stands at left with a dog, leans on a gate and gazes across a yard at a white cottage with green shutters. There is a lily pond at right and two cows in the shaded yard near the house. Beyond the gate, a road leads to a gate at the far side of the yard, with a valley and mountains in the distance. 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

1866

Medium

Hand-colored lithograph

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Gift of A. S. Colgate, 1952