Life in the Country – Morning

This landscape depicts a three-storey Italianate villa with a veranda and bracketed tower, built on a hill overlooking a river. In the foreground, a man and women drive down a road in an open carriage drawn by two white horses. Children run across the lawn, and other figures stroll through the grounds, and watch a steamboat drawn up to a landing stage on the river (at right) as sailboats sail beyond.

When Frances "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer moved to New York from England in 1844 she was thirty-two and an accomplished artist and printmaker. Initially, Fanny and her husband Seymour operated a small print-shop in lower Manhattan, similar to one they had run in Leicester (United Kingdom). In 1849, the couple moved to Brooklyn after the business closed. Nathaniel Currier recognized Palmer’s talent and began to buy her drawings to use as print designs. After Currier & Ives was established in 1857 she became a staff artist. As a designer able to transfer images to lithographic stones for printing, Palmer produced more than 200 prints for the firm and today is regarded as a leading woman lithographer of the period, and is particularly admired for her evocative landscapes.