David and Art - Winter in Summer

There’s not much about summer in Texas that reminds me of winter.Actually, there’s not much in an average winter in Texas these days that would remind you of traditional images of that season.

A few weeks ago, we talked about American composer Charles Ives.Any time I mention him, I’m usually asked if he was any relation to another famous American artist who shared the same last name.  Since the middle of the 19^th century, the phrase “Currier and Ives” has called to mind a particular kind of illustration.Our ideas of what winter scenes and Christmas should look like were shaped in large part by this artistic duo.In our day of TikTok videos and Instagram influencers, it’s hard for us to understand how powerful individual printed images were in earlier American culture.

Nathaniel Currier was born in Massachusetts in 1813 and when he was 15 became an apprentice at a Boston print shop.By 1835, he had moved to New York City and gone into the printing business for himself.For a while, he mostly took on jobs like sheet music and handbills but soon resolved to choose his own images.In December 1835, he made a print depicting the ruins of a building on Wall Street that was destroyed in the city’s calamitous fire that year and it was a sensation.A few years later he made one that depicted a recent steamship disaster in Long Island Sound, and it sold over 1,000 copies.The public was hungry for current images.
 
His partner James Ives (no relation to composer Charles) was born in New York City in 1824.As a child he was a gifted, self-taught artist, but in 1850 signed on with the Currier Lithograph Company as a bookkeeper.Soon he was overseeing the entire business side of the shop.

But his artistic talents didn’t stay on the shelf, and even as he managed the finances, he quickly became the artistic eye of the company.He had an uncanny ability to sense what images people would like and which artists could depict them best.Soon he was interviewing artists for jobs and assigning them images.  By 1857 he was a full partner in the firm and its name changed.In addition to their familiar winter scenes, the company also produced popular images of sailing ships, political cartoons, dramatic depictions of Civil War battles, and maybe most famously, a lithograph of the Lincoln assassination.

Nathaniel Currier died in 1888, followed by Ives in 1895.They and their artists made an indelible impression on American culture, and even today show us how we saw ourselves as a people at a particular time in our history. Great art can do nothing better than that. 

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