The Fiend of the Road

Nathaniel Currier, whose successful New York-based lithography firm began in 1835, produced thousands of colored prints in various sizes that together create a vivid panorama of mid-to-late nineteenth century American life and its history. People eagerly acquired such lithographs featuring picturesque scenery, rural and city views, ships, railroads, portraits, hunting and fishing scenes, domestic life and numerous other subjects, as an inexpensive way to decorate their homes or business establishments. As the firm expanded, Nathaniel included his younger brother Charles in the business. In 1857, James Merritt Ives (the firm's accountant since 1852 and Charles's brother-in-law) was made a business partner; subsequently renamed Currier & Ives, the firm continued until 1907.

Scott Leighton was a Boston-based artist noted for his remarkable paintings of horses. His pictures reached wider audiences when Currier & Ives produced prints of thirty of his paintings in the early 1880s. In this humorous, wintry rural New England scene, an elderly man, smoking a pipe and holding a riding crop upright in his right hand, drives his horse-drawn wagon in the freezing cold. The brown horse leads the wagon right down the middle of a narrow road. Behind, three gentlemen, each in a horse-drawn sleigh, are eager to speed by the slower vehicle hogging the road. Yet they are dare not pass as there is a sign on an icy patch in the lower left foreground saying "DANGEROUS." .