Life in the Country – Evening

In this landscape, two women and two girls stroll up a path towards a villa with a veranda and tower crowned with an American flag. On the lawn, a fountain plays at the center of a circular flower bed. On the veranda, a seated man reads while a woman stands waiting to greet the arrivals; a child runs down the path towards the visitors. Down the expanse of lawn, a river is depicted in the left distance.

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, and is particularly admired for her evocative landscapes.