In 1857, Nathaniel Currier formed a partnership with James Merritt Ives, creating the printmaking firm of Currier & Ives. Located in lower Manhattan, the business was spectacularly prolific, producing an average of three or four new prints of a wide variety of subjects every week for fifty years. Today, the collection affords the opportunity to examine original Currier & Ives prints and to consider their place in history as a way of understanding how nineteenth-century Americans perceived and idealized themselves.
