Richmond Seminary, Staten Island, N.Y.

Frances Flora Bond Palmer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

A rural New York view showing a three-storey white building with a peaked roof containing an attic window, set on top of a hill, surrounded by trees.At the base of the hill is a fenced field, and a house with a columned porch, a dirt road in the foreground. 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 and produced this print. 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 became one of their staff artists and one of the leading women lithographers of the 19th century.

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