Home, Sweet Home

In a tree-shaded landscape, a man in the right foreground approaches his house on foot along a dirt road. His two young children rush through the front gate, their arms extended in greeting, as his wife waits at the front door. The lyrics for "Home, Sweet Home," a popular song in the mid-nineteenth century, appear in the bottom margin of the print.

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.