Currier and Ives

During the last half of the nineteenth century, America's favorite pictorial storytellers were Currier and Ives, printmakers extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of Currier and Ives's hand-colored engravings made their way onto the walls of homes across the country. From pastoral America to bustling scenes of city life, horse racing, fire fighting - you name it - Nathaniel Currier and James Merrit Ives pictured it. Numerous previous books have surveyed the charming Currier and Ives repertoire, which numbers some seven thousand subjects. Published here for the first time, however, are more than seventy-five of the 204 prints that Currier and Ives created especially to appeal to Irish-Americans. At the time these pictures were published many who bought them were newly arrived in the United States, victims of the terrible famines and farm evictions in Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s. As this new population grew and its affluence increased, these colorful Currier and Ives prints served well as reminders of home, the Ireland left behind. The prints show the Irish landscape, key moments in Irish history, portraits of men and women of importance, and episodes of daily life. All these fasci