Nathaniel Currier
The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor
Color Lithograph
8.5 x 13 in.
1846
Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) was an American lithographer
and founder of Currier and Ives printmaking firm. Initially Currier focused on printing sheet music,
letterheads, hand bills, etc. Soon
after he began his career he began to focus on creating pictures of current
events such as “ The Destruction of Tea at Boston Harbor”. The Boston Tea Party (as it is known
today) was the Sons of Liberty showing the British Government that they were
not going to accept the outrageous taxes on tea. It was one of many issues that led to the Revolutionary War.
“Each of us have, in our mind's eye, a visual image of what it was
like to live a hundred or hundred and fifty years ago. Perhaps the most vivid
of these come from movies, westerns such as Stagecoach, small period
pieces like Little Women, or great epics like Gone with the Wind.
Some of our images come from the genre paintings of the era, such as the work
of Eastman Johnson. In some cases, crude photos of great events come to mind;
all of which have served to illustrate the ponderous old American history books
we all used to lug back and forth to class every day in high school. And if we
still had those books, and peered into them once more, we might realize yet
another type of imagery we've probably forgotten about, but which once made up
a very great part of how American's saw themselves in the nineteenth century--the
lithographic print. And at the top of that pictorial genre is the name, Currier
and Ives.” Jim Lane
No comments:
Post a Comment