American Farm Yard – Evening

In this rural scene, three cows (one lying down) and a calf stand in the farmyard, with a barn at left. Chickens dot the central foreground, while pigs eat from a trough at right --their sty being behind a wooden fence at the far right. In the central middleground are three horses (brown, white and black) and a brown foal. Down a road and behind a picket fence in the background, a white house is shown beside a cluster of trees.

When Frances "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer moved to New York from England in 1844 she was thirty-two and an accomplished artist and printmaker. Initially, Fanny and her husband Seymour operated a small print-shop in lower Manhattan, similar to one they had run in Leicester (United Kingdom). In 1849, the couple moved to Brooklyn after the business closed. Nathaniel Currier recognized Palmer’s talent and began to buy her drawings to use as print designs. After Currier & Ives was established in 1857 she became a staff artist. As a designer able to transfer images to lithographic stones for printing, Palmer produced more than 200 prints for the firm and today is regarded as a leading woman lithographer of the period.