Farm Life in Summer – The Cooling Stream
Publisher Currier & Ives American
Not on view
In the foreground, cattle stand in a river to drink as a man leads oxen pulling a cart piled with hay along a road at left; beside this there is a house and well.
The New York firm of Currier & Ives grew from a printing business established by Nathaniel Currier (1813–1888) in 1835. Expansion led, in 1857, to a partnership with brother-in-law James Merritt Ives (1824–1895). The firm operated until 1907, lithographing over 4,000 subjects for distribution across America and Europe with popular categories including landscape, marines, natural history, genre, caricatures, portraits, history and foreign views. Until the 1880s, images were printed in monochrome, then hand-colored by women who worked for the company.
