The Old Oaken Bucket

In this rural scene a boy drinks from a bucket at a well beside a tree, with a gated fence enclosing the yard of a white three-story house. Two girls stand at the foot of the front stairs. Beside tall trees at left, ducks and three cows are shown in a calm stretch of river, near a path and a bridge attached to a mill. Beyond the mill, the river cascades through a rocky ravine towards distant mountains. Cows graze in a field below a wooded hillside in the middle distance and stanzas of verse, printed below, characterize the image.
The stanzas come from the beginning of the popular poem "The Old Oaken Bucket" (1818):
"How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood,
When fond recollection present them to view,
The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wood,
And every loved spot which my infancy knew.
The wide spreading pond, and the mill that stood by it,
The bridge and the rock where the cataract fell;
The cot of my father the dairy house nigh it,
And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the well."

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.