Home to Thanksgiving

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 pictures became immensely popular with a vast public. This print features a lovely snow-covered setting with a young man, who has just arrived home in a horse-drawn sleigh, greeting his family on the front porch of a modest farmhouse. Together, they will celebrate the traditional American Thanksgiving holiday and a successful harvest. In the central foreground, a youth holding a staff stands near an oxen-drawn sled loaded with logs, as a dog approaches from the left. To complete this picture of a well-run farmstead, a man appears in a barn doorway amid other well-kept farm buildings, while two cows and chickens are in the barnyard. Instead of showing hardships, the artist idealized the wholesome benefits of country life, inspired by his own experiences living in Connecticut.

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.