Winter in the Country: Getting Ice

During the 1850s and early 1860s, George H. Durrie specialized in making landscapes and idyllic rural scenes. When the Currier & Ives printing firm selected ten of Durrie's paintings to be made into lithographs, Durrie's charming winter images became immensely popular with a vast public. In this snow-covered rural scene featuring a frozen pond, two men chop blocks of ice (creating a large hole in the pond), while another man loads the ice blocks a horse-drawn wooden sledge. In the background, four men skate on the pond. Mountains are shown in the distance, beyond a lone farm building in the right background. Prior to modern methods of refrigeration, a necessary winter chore was was cutting ice and packing it away for use during the rest of the year. Instead of depicting the hardships of country life, however, the artist idealized the scene's picturesque qualities, inspired by the Connecticut landscape, where he lived.

Nathaniel Currier, who established a successful New York-based lithography firm in 1835, produced thousands of hand-colored prints in various sizes that together create a vivid panorama of mid-to-late nineteenth century America. In 1857, James Merritt Ives (1824-1895), the accounting-savvy brother-in-law of Nathaniel's brother Charles, was made a business partner; subsequently renamed Currier & Ives, the firm continued until 1907. People eagerly acquired Currier & Ives lithographs, such as those featuring spectacular American landscapes, or rural and city views, hunting and fishing scenes, domestic life and numerous other subjects, as an inexpensive way to decorate their homes or business establishments.