Trolling for Blue Fish
Frances Flora Bond Palmer American, born England
Lithographer Currier & Ives American
Publisher Currier & Ives American
Not on view
In choppy waves, four men wearing wide-brimmed hats troll for bluefish from a small sailboat. One leans over the stern to pull in his catch, and other boats are shown in the 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.
