Summer Morning

In this idyllic rural picture of nineteenth-century American girlhood, five little girls gather on a tree-lined dirt road to fashion wild flowers into garlands. Beyond is a small village; in the distance, a few sailboats sail on an expanse of water.

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 American life. Expansion led, in 1857, to a partnership with James Merritt Ives (1824–1895), the brother-in-law of Nathaniel's brother Charles. 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.

As an artist able to transfer images to lithographic stones for printing, Frances Flora (Fanny) Palmer produced more than 200 prints for Currier & Ives. Today, she is regarded as a leading woman lithographer of the period. When she immigrated to New York from England in 1844, she was already an accomplished artist and printmaker. Fanny and her husband Seymour operated a small print-shop in lower Manhattan until 1849, when the couple moved to Brooklyn. Nathaniel Currier began to buy print designs from Palmer around this time, and she became a staff artist for Currier & Ives after 1857. As this captivating print exemplifies, Palmer's images had wide appeal to American collectors.