Homeward Bound (New York)

Erskine Nicol

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A well-dressed Irishman has done well in America. He now stands on a dock and considers whether to return, studying a sign lettered, "To Emigrants, Returning New York to Dublin, the Fast Sailing Barque Washington Will Sail on.... Apply here at 11 Broadway." The print is a companion to "Outward Bound (Dublin)" (50.587.7), and both are based on paintings by the Scottish-born Erskine Nichol. A genre painter who taught in Dublin during the Irish Famine, Nichol's works often respond to that tragedy. The New York firm of Currier & Ives (established by Nathaniel Currier, who formed a partnership with his James Merritt Ives in 1857), lithographed 4,300 subjects between 1835 and 1907 for distribution across America and Europe. They offered images of almost everything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the United States, and issued landscapes, genre subjects, caricatures, portraits, historical scenes, foreign views and reproductions of art works. The pictures were drawn on lithographic stones, printed in monochrome, then generally hand-colored by women who also worked for the firm.

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