Last week we talked about the famous artistic duo of Currier and Ives, whose lithographs showed Americans of the 19th century what their country looked like—or at least what Americans wanted it to look like. Among the artists James Ives hired for the company was a woman named Francis Flora Palmer.
Francis Flora Bond was born in Leicester, England in the summer of 1812, right after the United States and Britain went to war, in what became known on this side of the Atlantic as the War of 1812. She was one of 5 sisters. When she was a kid, she attended an exclusive private school for girls in London that specialized in the arts and she proved herself gifted.
After she was married in 1832, she and her husband Samuel Palmer established a lithography business. She was the artist and he the printer and the business operator. “Every description of Fancy Lithographic Printing [is] executed in the highest Parisian and London taste,” guaranteed one of their advertisements in a Leicester newspaper. It explained that they offered “architectural and botanical drawings, maps, and plans of estates.”
She made many sketches of places in and around Leicester. One critic said that “The view of Beacon Hill is in Mrs. Palmer's most tasteful and successful style, and is distinguished by a boldness and freedom not often exhibited by a female pencil.”
Another that “We cordially recommend Mrs. Palmer's work to the notice, not only of all attached to our local scenery, but of all interested (as who in these days is not!) in the general progress and advancement of the graphic arts.”
She and her husband came to the United States around 1844 and settled in Brooklyn. They continued with their business and got by on sheet music covers an, after 1846, dramatic and not altogether accurate scenes of the war the US was fighting in Mexico. Eventually though the business began to have trouble, and that’s when she was approached by James Ives with an offer to join his company. She signed on as an illustrator, and her husband became a tavern keeper
By the 1860s she was one of Currier and Ives’ most prolific artists. Over the course of that decade, she was credited with over 100 lithographs when most of the company’s artists didn’t get any individual recognition at all. So when you see a Currier and Ives lithograph, there’s a really good chance it’s one of hers. Francis Flora Palmer became the first woman in the United States to make a living as a professional artist. She died of tuberculosis in 1876.
