ExclusiveJames Merritt Ives: The Business Genius Behind Currier & Ives

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans There are many old songs, particularly Christmas songs, that we sing year after year, and we don't really think about what the words mean. Maybe we never really knew. For instance, in Leroy Anderson's Sleigh Ride, there's a line which goes, It'll nearly be like a picture print by Currier and Ives. I'm sure we all know that song, and we've heard the line every Christmas of our lives, but how many people really know who Currier and Ives are or were and what their prints looked like? Well, a cursory search on the internet will tell you that Currier and Ives was a printmaking business in New York City from 1837 to 1905. But the word print has a very different meaning now than what it did in the 19th century. Nowadays, when you think of a printer, you think of some hard plastic thing that reproduces PDFs from your computer. But at that time, in the later part or the earlier part of the 19th century, a printer wasn't a machine, but a skilled artist and technician who used in-depth technology to create images before photography was widely used. Today, we're going to talk about the second man in the name of Currier and Ives and how he built this lithographic printing business into the best-known lithography which the country or the world has ever known. Currier and Ives are two names that go together like bread and butter. Currier, the older man in the partnership, born in 1813, deserves the credit for establishing the business and founding it in the early days, in 1835, when he was just 22 years old. But it became what it would be famous for being through the efforts of his later business partner, James Merritt Ives. Now, James Ives was born on March 5th, 1824. He was born on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital, where his father was the superintendent, and he also grew up there. Ives had to go to work when he was 12, so he didn't have that much formal education, but he became a self-taught artist. As a boy, he would go to the Astor Library and other art galleries around New York City to learn more about different forms of art. As a young man, Jim Ives met and fell in love with a young lady named Caroline Clark, and they got married in 1846. They would eventually have four children together. This ended up being not only an important personal relationship for him, but it would lead to the business relationship that would define the rest of his life and career. You see, Caroline Clark had a sister named Elizabeth, and Elizabeth was married to a man named Charles Currier. Charles Currier was the brother of Nathaniel Currier, who had founded the prominent lithographic business in New York City, which at this point was known as N. Currier Lithographer. Now, Currier had originally started this business as a partnership with another man who left the partnership after only one year. So since 1835, he had been on his own for over 15 years managing this printing business and eventually finding great success in making prints of current and local news stories. Since this was before photography was being used in newspapers, instead, his partnership with the New York Sun, an extra page called the Extra Sun, was the first time that any kind of image was widely used in the newspaper. As he was a young family man, Jim Ives needed a steady form of income, so he was trying to get a good job. Thus, he asked his brother-in-law, Charles, to introduce him to his brother because he was a professional bookkeeper. So he was introduced to Nat Currier, and he was hired as the bookkeeper for N. Currier Lithographer. He quickly cleaned up the books, made everything streamlined, saved them money, and he did more than that. Because he wasn't just a bookkeeper, he also was a self-trained artist, and he used that artistic sense to find ways that they could also streamline the printing process. He also reorganized the inventory as well as continuing to modernize the bookkeeping system. He understood what the artists were experiencing as they were working in the company, since he was an artist himself, and he also had a remarkable knack for knowing what the public wanted. He was great at marketing. And because of this innate business sense, Currier recognized his abilities, and before long, he relied on him so entirely that he made him general manager of the business. In 1857, he offered him a partnership in the company, and the firm was renamed Currier and Ives. The two men couldn't have been more different. Nathaniel Currier was a tall, slender, melancholy man, whereas Jim Ives was a plump, jovial fellow. This was just what made their partnership so powerful, and it was why they became very close personal friends. They complemented each other because of how different they were, the more serious, thoughtful nature and the more jovial, fun-loving personality. Because of that, they worked together very well, and Currier was a man of great vision, so he was able to see all the potential that Ives could unlock for the business. Ives quickly helped him expand the business into more different types of printing. Rather than just focusing on news, or just doing the kind of print jobs that Currier had originally done, like printing music or making copies of things, they began making prints which would be just for entertainment or decoration purposes. For instance, they began making political cartoons and satires, comedy strips, ongoing comics, of course, commentary on current events, news depictions. Throughout the Civil War, they made extremely popular prints of the most important battles and incidents during the war, and sentimental prints. That's the thing for which Currier and Ives is most known today, and that's to what the song by Leroy Anderson is referring. Under Ives' leadership, they began making prints which depicted the idyllic beauty of American life. They made beautiful landscapes, scenes of family life, wintry scenes, patriotic images, and drawings depicting different businesses. For instance, one of their most popular prints was The Life of a Fireman, and this was a series of images showing firemen in various different jobs or incidents of life. I think it's no coincidence that both Currier and Ives served in the Volunteer Fire Department in New York City in the 1850s. Their winter images were especially popular, and even today they're still used in Christmas cards for a nostalgic, quaint feeling. During their heyday, Currier and Ives occupied the third through fifth floors of a large building in New York. Each floor had a different job. On the third floor were the printing presses, operated by hand. These would have some kind of a plate or stone in them, and then printers would operate them by hand, putting in the paper or the folio, as they would often call it. It could be a small one, it could be a very large one, more like a canvas, and they would imprint the images on there. The fourth floor is where the stone engravers and the lithographers worked, and that's where they would take the original image and draw it onto a stone. They would take a clean piece of limestone and carve that image onto the stone. This stone would then become the plate that was used in the printing press downstairs on the third floor to make that image. It would take sometimes as long as a week to make an original stone. So they were very careful to consider what they were going to print. They wanted to be sure that they'd be able to sell at least 100 prints if they were going to make a stone. Sometimes they would need to make so many prints so quickly that they would make copies of that original stone, which was also a particular process. They would have to use a specific type of pencil and paper and ink to draw it on a piece of paper and transfer it over to the other stone. Now, even though it was the same image, the prints from the two different stones, or however many different stones they'd end up making, would look a little different, because the grain of the stone itself would affect how the print looked. And that's why in the existing prints you can find, although technically it's the same lithographic engraving, the prints could look a little different. If a print was very successful or very popular, they would sometimes name it, number it, and save it so that they could use it again. But if it didn't sell so well, or they didn't think it would ever be interesting again, or it was a smaller one, they would grind it over so they could reuse the stone. On the fifth floor was the coloring department. You see, these images weren't sold as black and white images. Now, I think some of the original news stories might have been, but those prints for which they were well known were in color. So they needed an assembly line process up on that fifth floor. This was one of America's first production lines, and consistency was very important, because, again, these weren't original paintings. They were supposed to be prints, meaning that they all looked basically the same. So there would be the original image, the original piece of artwork, which would sometimes be done by a very famous artist. Some of the top artists in America would work for Currier & Ives at the time, either just reproducing prints because people wanted to see them, or on a case-by-case basis, they would hire them to make the original draft of the prints, sometimes signed and sometimes not. So each colorist would have a copy of it or it would be posted somewhere where they all could see it, and because it was assembly line, each different colorist would be assigned to work on a different color. So one person would do the purple, one person would do the blue, one person would do the green, and there was very carefully numbered and given instructions on exactly where to put the color. So by the time it had gone through every colorist, it was all colored and ready to go. Then there was one person who would oversee it and fill in anything that might have been missed and check to make sure that it was looking accurate. These colorists were for the most part immigrant young women, many of whom were from Germany, who were trained artists from Europe, but because they didn't speak the language very well and they were immigrants, so they had a lower socioeconomic status, they couldn't necessarily get that much work as artists in their own right, but they did have the skill to very effectively and artistically fill in these prints. Occasionally the prints would be sold in black and white without any coloring on them, and in that case the dealers would also buy instructions on how to fill them in. If either the dealer wanted to do it or the people who would buy them wanted to paint them themselves, sometimes for art class or just for fun or for personal customization, they preferred to not do that because it would have to sell them for cheaper and they just wanted more uniformity, but they did do that sometimes. When they got very busy, such as during the Civil War, they would occasionally outsource the coloring to other groups of artists if they couldn't handle it all within their own staff. Many very prominent American artists of the day got their start working for Currier and Ives. Now this process sounds so labor-intensive and so specialized that one would imagine these must have been very expensive, but on the contrary, it was such a well-oiled machine that Currier and Ives prided itself in making the images very affordable. The company called itself, quote, the Grand Central Depot for cheap and popular prints, and they declared that they sold colored engravings for the people. They specialized in these hand-painted colored prints and, again, because of the assembly line process, they were able to turn them out very quickly. During the almost 70 years of the business's existence, they sold more than a million prints with over 7,500 different images created. Those original prints that are still around today are very valuable now. Only a few of the lithographic stones are still in existence because when the business was dissolved, most of them were sold off and many were ground up and put in landfills in Central Park. They didn't seem that valuable at the time. In 1880, Nathaniel Currier retired because he was getting older and he just wanted to sort of enjoy the last few years of his life. So he had his son, Edward, take over for his share of the business. And in 1888, Currier died. Ives continued managing the business very actively alongside his business partner's son until his death in 1895. At that point, his son, Chauncey, took over for his share of the business and the two sons ran the business for a while until 1902 when, by that point, Edward Currier was suffering from tuberculosis so he couldn't really manage the business anymore. So he sold his share to Chauncey Ives. Chauncey managed the business by himself until 1907, by which point lithography was really going out of style. By that point, the photographic prints was much more affordable and it could be done quickly. Now, doing things quickly was never the most important thing for Currier and Ives. Years earlier, they could have used the steam press instead of the hand printing press. But they didn't want to do that because they believed that the images weren't as clear or as crisp or as... But by this point, you know, times are changing. So he sold his remaining equipment to the shop's foreman and Currier and Ives was officially out of business. That was by no means the end of the legacy, though. Although lithography was no longer the main way of sharing images as it once had been, that almost made the prints more beloved in a nostalgic way. You see, during their heyday, which was the last few decades of the 19th century, people began to really enjoy those prints, not just for news, but as very popular and well-regarded home decorations. Many magazines noted that proper homes would be decorated with prints by Currier and Ives on the wall. And the beautiful images of country scenes, people ice skating on a frozen lake, a lovely cottage, horses, animals, children, would be a very lovely addition to any home. Sometimes they'd be sold with frames, sometimes not. And wherever they were sold or bought, there was such a wide variety that you can see why people of many different tastes would find some print which suited their fancy. You find a lot of Currier and Ives prints that include horses, either in a more pastoral setting or in a racetrack setting. And this also wasn't surprising because Nathaniel Currier loved fast horses and he had a stable of his own on his country property. As they were not only businessmen, but individuals with their own taste, it's interesting to see how the personal tastes of Currier and Ives made their way into their prints and their ongoing series, many of which are very informative of the era and others of which are completely timeless. They could just represent America in any time. Those prints by Currier and Ives are like a postcard into a good deal of the 19th century in America. You could definitely say that their heyday was what's known as the Victorian era. It's a bit inaccurate to call it the Victorian era in America because we weren't under the throne of Queen Victoria, but that time did define the whole world, especially because Currier began his printing business just two years before Queen Victoria took the throne. Think of all the time that passed while Currier and Ives was in business, all the different changes that happened in the country, all the different military conflicts and expansion west. It really was a remarkable time and we can remember that time and see how people depicted it in those days by looking at the beautiful prints of Currier and Ives. They represent the nostalgic beauty of Americana. Thank you for spending this time with me and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.