155.     CURRIER & IVES (publisher). PALMER, F[rances] F[lora Bond (Fanny)] (artist). New York Bay. From Bay Ridge, L.I. [below image] F.F. Palmer, del. | Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1860, by Currier & Ives, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court, for the United States for the Southern Dist^t. of N.Y. | Lith. Currier & Ives. N.Y. [keyed below imprint] Bedlows Island | Communipaw | Gibbet Island | Hoboken Gastle [sic] Garden | Governors Island | New York. New York, 1860. Hand-colored lithograph view of the bay with Bedlow’s Island at left and Manhattan at right, border to border: 37.5 x 51.5 cm; image and imprint below: 40.5 x 51.5 cm; overall sheet size: 46.1 x 59.2 cm. Scattered light foxing, light mat burn in blank margins, otherwise fine, color exceptionally strong and beautiful. Matted, gilt frame, under Plexiglas.

     First edition. Gale, Currier & Ives: A Catalogue Raisonné 4821. Conningham 4435. Peters, Currier & Ives 4005. This bucolic view was created by artist-lithographer Frances Flora Bond Palmer. The print embodies the ideals of landscape architect and early suburban planner Andrew Jackson Downing.

     Frances Flora Bond Palmer (b. England 1812-d. Brooklyn 1876), was one of the most productive staff artists for Currier & Ives, for whom she worked for over twenty-five years. In the early 1830s, she married Edmund Seymour Palmer, an English “gentleman” who proved incapable of supporting his family. The Palmer and Bond families emigrated to the United States and by 1844 were in New York, where Fanny became the chief support of the families through the lithographic firm, F. & S. Palmer, founded by her and her husband. The Palmer lithographic enterprise failed, and her husband died in 1857 when he fell down the stairs of a tavern in Brooklyn, where he was caretaker.

     In 1849 Fanny joined Currier & Ives as a staff artist, creating over two hundred images—large and small—ranging from small works celebrating quotidian joys to larger works of epic style, such as The Rocky Mountains, Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1866) and Across the Continent, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1866). In 1847 William H. Ranlett wrote that Fanny “stands at the head of the art” of lithography. In a more modern assessment, Deák calls her “the foremost woman lithographer of her time” (Picturing America, I, pp. 438-439). Notable American Women III, pp. 10-11:

Fanny Palmer was a creative lithographer, doing her own drawings directly on the stone. The only woman in her field, she was one of the best American lithographers; she also achieved success in working with Charles Currier to perfect the lithographic crayon. Trained as a draftsman in England, she was familiar with lithographic art when she came to the United States; she introduced to American printers the skill of printing a background tint.

See Items 157 and 158 following herein.

($1,000-2,000)

Auction 22 Abstracts