The Old Mare - The Best Horse

Currier & Ives, the leading American printer and publisher of lithographs from the mid-1850s to 1907, created thousands of affordable prints that appealed to popular taste, as exemplified by this humorous winter sleigh race on a country road. Scott Leighton was a skilled painter of horses, as well as of landscapes. After Currier & Ives published prints based on a selection of Leighton's art, his popularity increased. In this scene, he depicted thee one-horse sleighs racing: a woman passenger tries to steady herself in a sleigh that is airborne as it is pulled by its runaway gray horse, which is neck-to-neck with a brown horse rearing frantically because its left foreleg is caught inside a top hat--much to the consternation of the sleigh driver. At left, the third sleigh trails a bit behind the other two. Behind them, one can glimpse a stunned, hatless man sitting on the road after being thrown from one of the sleighs. Currier & Ives aggressively marketed such captivating pictures showing amusing aspects of American life as a suitable, inexpensive way to decorate private homes and public buildings.