Cuffee Dancing for Eels – Catharine Market (Life in New York)

Currier & Ives|Thomas B. Worth

1857 · Hand-colored lithograph · Drawings and Prints

Cuffee Dancing for Eels – Catharine Market (Life in New York) — Currier & Ives|Thomas B. Worth

The late nineteenth-century Darktown prints by Currier & Ives depict racist stereotypes that are offensive and disturbing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves such works to shed light on their historical context and to enable the study and evaluation of racism. A satirical New York genre subject on a quay near Catharine Market: eight white men and boys stand around a black man (wearing ragged clothes), who dances. At left, another Black man dangles eels in front of the dancing man. At right, the Bowery B'hoy Mose leans against a barrel.

Artist
Currier & Ives|Thomas B. Worth
Date
1857
Medium
Hand-colored lithograph
Department
Drawings and Prints
Credit line
Bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962