Fanny Palmer – LASTING IMPRESSIONS

Frances Flora Bond Palmer is one of the most important women artist-lithographers of nineteenth-century America. She was born in Leicester, England, in 1812 to an upper-middle-class family. Known as “Fanny” from her childhood, she received her first artistic education at Mary Linwood’s academy for girls, located not far from her home. Linwood was an internationally renowned artist who had a permanent exhibition of her own needlework pictures on Leicester Square in London. At Linwood’s academy, Fanny received solid instruction in drawing, perspective, and watercolor—three areas that were key to the training of lithographers in the early Victorian era.

Sometime between her marriage to Edmund Seymour Palmer, in 1832, and the death of her father, in 1839, Fanny Palmer opened a drawing school in Leicester. As her family weathered economic hardship in the wake of her father’s death, Fanny and Seymour decided to establish themselves in the lithographic business. She went to London to train with Louis Haghe (1806–1885), one of the founders of Day & Haghe, the leading art lithography firm of early Victorian London. Meanwhile, her husband became a professional printer. In 1842 the Palmers founded their own firm in Leicester as Fanny continued to teach in her “Drawing Academy.” By January 1844, the couple had immigrated to New York, where they established themselves as F. & S. Palmer, lithographers.

Frances Palmer collaborated with Nathaniel Currier as early as 1849, when she created a series of panoramic views of New York City for the firm. By the end of 1851, her own company, F. & S. Palmer lithographers, had closed. Her husband was now a tavern keeper, and she was on her way to becoming one of Currier & Ives’s most prolific artists, designing at least 200 of the firm’s most famous prints between 1851 and 1868. The only interview published during Palmer’s lifetime indicates that she also ran a lithographic workshop in her home, where she designed pictures, drew them on lithographic stone, and painted them as models for the Currier & Ives colorists. A true master, she also instructed several apprentices, some of whom continued to work for her as employees. Although she was listed in the Brooklyn city directory as a lithographer as late as 1873, no print signed “Palmer” has survived beyond 1868. She died of tuberculosis in 1876 and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

PALMER’S EARLY WORK IN NEW YORK

Church of the Holy Trinity, one of the early prints designed by Palmer and printed by her husband, shows Palmer’s sophisticated use of the tint stone, a skill she learned at Day & Haghe but adapted here to her own design. The British firm was well known for its use of tint stones in the printing of architectural drawings, which replicated the effect of a watercolor wash in the background of a line drawing, as seen in The New Church at Lee, in Kent. In such a process, two lithographic stones were prepared: one with the crayon drawing, and one with a broad expanse of solid tone for the background and small areas removed to create white highlights. For Church of the Holy Trinity, Palmer produced a tint stone for the sky, with its white clouds, and created crayon drawings on two separate stones. One was printed in black, delineating the contours and architectural details of the church; the second, printed in brown ink, highlighted the texture of the stone and enhanced the dramatic effect of sunlight on the ornate surface of the church.

In New York Palmer rapidly gained recognition by exhibiting at the National Academy of Design and the American Institute. One of her largest New York commissions comprised the lithographs that reproduced architectural drawings of site views, elevations, and floor plans in William H. Ranlett’s two-volume book The Architect. In contrast to Nathaniel Currier’s hand-painted lithograph for Alexander Jackson Davis’s Rural Residences, Palmer’s two-stone lithographic technique highlights Ranlett’s picturesque designs by leaving the building’s surface largely white against a tinted landscaped background. The publication as a whole gives evidence of Palmer’s superb draftsmanship and high level of training in architectural renderings.

Between 1844 and 1845, Palmer met the writer Nehemiah Cleaveland and created his lithographic portrait. That encounter had repercussions for her work. Around the time that Cleaveland translated Grandville’s Les Fleurs Animées for a New York edition, Palmer drew several lithographs inspired by that publication for autograph albums published by J. C. Riker. An illustration called Forget Me Not, from the Riker album Flower Tokens, freely adapted the background of Grandville’s Myosotis. In her interpretation, Palmer’s steamboat resembles the contemporary Hudson River ships that carried passengers and freight between Albany and New York. In these small printed images, Palmer reveals her interest in the representation of the newest machines that transformed transportation during the Industrial Revolution.

In 1852 Currier published a series of sporting prints, all bearing the signature “From Nature and on Stone by F. F. Palmer” at the lower left of the image. The Long Island Series, as it is now known, forms a unique ensemble because of its long-lasting popularity as well as the artist’s insistence on personal connections to the lithographic print. Using the printed text, she affirmed her presence at the scene. She also included a reference to her husband in the title of Quail Shooting: “Setters the Property of S. Palmer Esq.” At the same time, she asserted a double claim of authorship as both the intellectual designer of the composition and the creator of the image on stone.

During the Civil War, Palmer drew several nocturnal landscapes evoking the power of steam on land and water. In contrast to many painters, she demonstrated an interest in steam transportation early on—as in her interpretation of J. J. Grandville’s pictures for Flower Tokens.

The two large folios seen here, commissioned by Currier & Ives, highlight Palmer’s ability to create large-scale dramatic compositions filled with a sense of the epic: strong diagonals, moonlighting, artificial lights, and the sparks of the furnace against the landscapes in semi-darkness, enhancing the sense of tension, power, and speed. In contrast to The Lightning Express Trains, however, the race between the Isaac Newton and the Francis Skiddy in A Night on the Hudson carried a nostalgic tone. Published in 1864, a year after the Newton exploded near Fort Washington, Palmer’s lithograph commemorated a competition between two of the fastest and most splendid steamers that had run on the Hudson during the 1840s and 1850s.

FRANCES BOND PALMER

ARTIST AND LITHOGRAPHER IN THE VICTORIAN ERA

“One must have the talent of an artist and great practice with the pencil.”

PALMER’S EARLY WORK IN NEW YORK

Click to see more works by Palmer in Winterthur’s collection