Америкалық литография шеберханасы: Currier and Ives тарихы

American printmaking firm

Currier and Ives was a New York City based printmaking business operating from 1835 to 1907. Founded by Nathaniel Currier, the company designed and sold inexpensive hand painted lithographic works based on news events, views of popular culture and Americana. Advertising itself as "the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints," the corporate name was changed in 1857 to "Currier and Ives" with the addition of James Merritt Ives. A perennial bestselling series was the Darktown Comics lithographs.

Nathaniel Currier (1813–88) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on March 27, 1813, the second of four children. His parents Nathaniel and Hannah Currier were distant cousins who lived a humble and spartan life. Tragedy struck when Nathaniel was eight years old, when his father unexpectedly died, leaving Nathaniel and his eleven year old brother Lorenzo to provide for the family: six year old sister Elizabeth and two year old brother Charles, as well as their mother. Nathaniel worked a series of odd jobs to support the family and, at fifteen, he started what became a lifelong career when he apprenticed in the Boston lithography shop of William and John Pendleton. In 1833 at age twenty, he moved to Philadelphia to do contract work for M. E. D. Brown, a noted engraver and printer. Currier's early lithographs were issued under the name of Stodart & Currier, a result of the partnership that he created in 1834 with a local New York printmaker named Stodart. The two men specialized in "job" printing and made a variety of print products, including music manuscripts. Currier became dissatisfied with the poor economic return of their business venture and ended the partnership in 1835. He set up shop alone, working as "N. Currier, Lithographer" until 1856. In 1835, he created a lithograph that illustrated a fire sweeping through New York City's business district. The print of the Merchant's Exchange sold thousands of copies in four days. Currier realized that there was a market for current news, so he turned out several more disaster prints and other inexpensive lithographs that illustrated local and national events, such as "Ruins of the Planter's Hotel, New Orleans, which fell at two O’clock on the Morning of May 15, 1835, burying 50 persons, 40 of whom Escaped with their Lives. In 1840, he produced "Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington", which was so successful that he was given a weekly insert in the New York Sun. In that year, Currier's firm began to shift its focus from job printing to independent print publishing.

The name Currier and Ives first appeared in 1857, when Currier invited the company's bookkeeper and accountant James Merritt Ives (1824–95) to become his partner. Ives was born on March 5, 1824, in New York City, and he married Caroline Clark in 1852. She was the sister in law of Nathaniel's brother Charles Currier, and it was Charles who recommended Ives to his brother. Nathaniel Currier soon noticed Ives's dedication to his business, and his artistic knowledge and insight into what the public wanted. The younger man quickly became the general manager of the firm, handling the financial side of the business by modernizing the bookkeeping, reorganizing inventory, and streamlining the print process.

The firm Currier and Ives described itself as "Publishers of Cheap and Popular Prints". At least 7,500 lithographs were published in the firm's 72 years of operation. Artists produced two to three new images every week for 64 years (1834–1895), producing more than a million prints by hand colored lithography. For the original drawings, Currier and Ives employed or used the work of many celebrated artists of the day, including James E. Buttersworth, George Inness, Thomas Nast, Eastman Johnson, and others. The earliest lithographs were printed in black and then colored by hand. As new techniques were developed, publishers began to produce full color lithographs that gradually developed softer, more painterly effects. Skilled artist lithographers such as John Cameron, Fanny Palmer, and others became known for their work and signed important pieces. Artists such as A. F. Tait became famous when their paintings were reproduced as lithographs. Currier and Ives was the most prolific and successful company of lithographers in the U. S. Its lithographs represented every phase of American life, and included the themes of hunting, fishing, whaling, city life, rural scenes, historical scenes, clipper ships, yachts, steamships, the Mississippi River, Hudson River scenes, railroads, politics, comedy, gold mining, winter scenes, commentary on life, portraits, and still lifes. the firm occupied three floors in a building at 33 Spruce Street in New York:

Hand operated printing presses occupied the third floor. Artists, stone grinders, and lithographers worked on the fourth floor. Colorists worked on the fifth floor. Small works sold for five to twenty cents each, and large works sold for $1 to $3 apiece. The Currier and Ives firm branched out from its central shop in New York City to sell prints via pushcart vendors, peddlers, and book stores. The firm sold retail as well as wholesale, establishing outlets in cities across the country and in London. It also sold work through the mail (prepaid orders only), and internationally through a London office and agents in Europe. The public demand for lithographs had gradually diminished because of improvements in offset printing and photoengraving.

Currier and Ives, because they were targeting a middle class American customer, inadvertently created a "pictorial record" of values in the United States in the 19th century, which included contemporary racism. According to Albert Baragwanath, of the approximately 500 "comic prints" produced by Currier and Ives, "more than half of these were the so called Darktown Comics whose humor lay in gross burlesque." According to J. Michael Martinez, every one of the series was a bestseller. Thomas Worth recreated a previous Statue of Liberty image, using an African American woman similar to the mammy figure holding a torch as part of their Darktown Comics series.