Biography:

Perhaps the most famous and prolific lithography house, Currier and Ives was founded on Nassau Street in New York City in 1834 by Nathaniel Currier.  Currier operated this print shop, with its factory around the corner on Spruce Street, for 70 years.  Currier enlisted self-trained artist James Merritt Ives in 1857 to create images for the firm.  Under the new partnership, the business thrived; Currier and Ives innovated an assembly line-like factory floor, with a work flowing from artists, to lithographers, to letterers, to colorists in an efficient pattern.
By the time the firm closed in 1907, they had a working catalog of over 7,000 images in a variety of genres:  popular news illustrations, political cartoons, celebrity portraits, sentimental images of families, children, and animals, as well as some copies of famous paintings.  In the years after the Civil War, Currier and Ives also began printing “darktown comics,” cartoons depicting racist stereotypes of African-Americans.
Business slowed for the firm at the turn of the 20th century, as costs dropped on photography and chromolithography, and hand-colored lithographs began to fall out of style. Currier and Ives had also suffered a myriad of personal tragedies over their careers and began to slow down. Just over a decade after the shop closed, after World War I, Currier and Ives prints came to be regarded as important pieces of Americana and became collectors’ items.