Currier's Early History
Nathaniel Currier (1813–88) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on March 27, 1813, the second of four children. His parents, Nathaniel and Hannah Currier, were distant cousins who lived a humble and spartan life. When Nathaniel was eight years old, tragedy struck. Nathaniel's father unexpectedly died leaving Nathaniel and his eleven-year-old brother Lorenzo to provide for the family. In addition to their mother, Nathaniel and Lorenzo had to care for six-year-old sister Elizabeth and two-year-old brother Charles. Nathaniel worked a series of odd jobs to support the family, and at fifteen, he started what would become a lifelong career when he apprenticed in the Boston lithography shop of William and John Pendleton. In 1833 at twenty years of age, he moved to Philadelphia to do contract work for M.E.D. Brown, a noted engraver and printer. Currier's early lithographs were issued under the name of Stodart & Currier, a result of the partnership he created in 1834 with a local New York printmaker named Stodart. The two men specialized in "job" printing and made a variety of print products, including music manuscripts. Dissatisfied with the poor economic return of their business venture, Currier ended the partnership in 1835 and set up shop alone, working as "N. Currier, Lithographer" until 1856. In 1835, he created a lithograph that illustrated a fire sweeping through New York City's business district. The print of the Merchant's Exchange sold thousands of copies in four days. Realizing that there was a market for current news, Currier turned out several more disaster prints and other inexpensive lithographs that illustrated local and national events, such as "Ruins of the Planter's Hotel, New Orleans, which fell at two O’clock on the Morning of May 15, 1835, burying 50 persons, 40 of whom Escaped with their Lives." He quickly gained a reputation as an accomplished lithographer.
In 1840, he produced "Awful Conflagration of the Steam Boat Lexington", which was so successful that he was given a weekly insert in the New York Sun. In this year, Currier's firm began to shift its focus from job printing to independent print publishing.
Read more about this topic: Currier And Ives
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