53rd Annual Delaware Show

1 Frances “Fanny” Palmer wasmarried to Edmund Seymour Palmer. They established a lithography business in England in 1842, F. & S. Palmer, and in New York in 1844. 2 Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, Fanny Palmer: Artist to the American People, forthcoming, 2017. See also her article, “The Early Career of Frances Flora Bond Palmer (1812–1876) in The American Art Journal 17, No. 4 (Autumn 1985), 71–88. A Winterthur Primer reprinted with permission from Antiques & Fine Art Magazine. Marie-Stephanie Delamaire is associate curator of fine arts at Winterthur. This article is generously sponsored by Mr. and Mrs. Bruce C. Perkins. A closer look at Palmer’s early work in New York calls attention to her role in the development of American lithography in the 1850s. More specifically, her fine use of multiple stones in the drawing of Church of the Holy Trinity suggests that she had a critical influence at Currier & Ives. Nathaniel Currier almost entirely limited his publications to black and white lithographs before hiring her. After 1851, the firm published several of their now iconic compositions, drawn by Palmer and printed with more than one stone. One of them, Wooding-Up on the Mississippi (fig. 3) , reveals how her brilliant handling of tonal values created a nocturne landscape that barely needs the addition of hand coloring that we expect to see on a Currier & Ives print. Palmer is one of the artists whose work is explored in Lasting Impressions: The Artists of Currier & Ives, at Winterthur Museum, from September 17, 2016, until January 8, 2017. Fig. 3. “Wooding up” on the Mississippi, F. F. Palmer, artist; Currier & Ives, lithographers, New York, ca. 1863. Library of Congress (LC-DIG-pga-00976). — 21 —