View of New York from Brooklyn Heights

Frances Flora Bond Palmer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This view of Lower Manhattan, from across the East River, includes church spires, warehouses and the densely clustered masts of anchored ships. In the middle ground paddle steamers and sailing ships ply the river and, in the foreground, eight people sit and stand on a strip of grass along Brooklyn Heights. When Frances "Fanny" Flora Bond Palmer moved to New York from England in 1844, she already was an accomplished artist and printmaker. Palmer and her husband Seymour initially operated a small printshop in lower Manhattan. By the time their business closed and they moved to Brooklyn in 1849, Nathaniel Currier was commissioning drawings from Fanny. After Currier & Ives was established in 1857, Palmer was hired as a staff artist and became one of the leading women lithographers of the 19th century. This print is one of her first for Nathaniel Currier.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art