American Country Life: Summers Evening

The "American Country Life" print series presented grand homes and affluent lifestyles in the four seasons. Pictures glamorizing rural life were popular with the American public, particularly as New York City became more densely populated with the arrival of many immigrants in the 1840s and 1850s. This appealing rosy sunset scene features a prosperous farm and strolling family, who pause beneath two large trees gracing their property. The proud gentleman farmer faces his wife as he gestures toward a hay field, where farmhands gather and load hay onto a wagon. Their large gabled house with green shutters, a covered porch and a hexagonal cupola stands in the central background. Several cows approach an open gate to return to the barn situated behind the house. In the right distance, a church steeple rises above a village. This picture exemplifies peaceful family life amid agrarian abundance.


Nathaniel Currier, whose successful New York-based lithography firm began in 1835, produced thousands of hand-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.

When Frances ("Fanny") Flora Bond Palmer arrived in New York as an immigrant from England in 1844, she was already an accomplished artist and printmaker. Initially, Fanny and her husband Seymour operated a small print-shop in lower Manhattan, but after their business closed in 1849, Nathaniel Currier began to buy print designs from Palmer. She became a staff artist for Currier & Ives after 1857, eventually producing more than 200 prints for the firm, including its best landscapes and most engaging scenes of daily life, as exemplified by this print. Today, Palmer is regarded as a leading woman lithographer of the period.