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The Art of Making Money Plenty

Currier and Ives - The Art of Making Money Plenty

The firm of Currier and Ives was a New York printmaking firm that operated from 1857 until 1907. Nathaniel Currier was a printmaker who started the business and James, who started as the firm's bookkeeper, became Currier's partner in 1857. Neither man was an artist. The prints were drawn and lithographed by other persons, such as J. E. Butterworth, George H. Durrie, Louis Maurer, Frances or "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer, Charles Parsons, Napoleon Sarony, and Thomas Worth - to name a few. Nathaniel Currier died in 1888 and James Ives died in 1895. The firm carried on until 1907 under the direction of their sons, Edward West Currier and Chauncey Ives.


The business of the firm was to produce lithographed prints which were intended to be sold to the general public for picture framing and display in the home or business place. For nearly seventy-five years, the firm provided "Colored Engravings for the People," and called themselves "Printmakers to the People." Currier and Ives gave America a nineteenth-century pictorial history of the country's growth from an agricultural society to an industrialized one.


Many newsworthy events were recorded with prints depicting every subject relating to American life: religion, politics, historical figures, views of homes, rural homesteads, sports, music, entertainment, games, life in the home, children, wildlife, hunting, fishing, railroad trains, ships, and many more.



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