A Home in the Country

This view centers on a white, three-story Victorian-style country mansion encircled by a porch and seen from a driveway flanked by tall trees. Four women (wearing long dresses), a child, and a dog walk on the path which skirts a circular lawn island accented by two tall trees. At the arched porch entry, a man and woman await their visitors.

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.wearing