Art: Currier & Ives

In their half-century as America’s greatest printmakers Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives produced some 8,000 lithographs, of which some 7,500 survive as nostalgic relics of 19th-Century Americana. From the largest private collection of Currier & Ives, owned by Harry T. Peters, Master of Fox Hounds at Long Island’s Meadow Brook Club, a volume of reproductions (Doubleday, Doran; $5) has now been published. The color plates are not as good as they might be but the book gives an excellent cross section of the flaming disasters, idyllic farm scenes, sentimental moralities, spanking race horses, political cartoons, Mississippi steamboats and vigorous frontier scenes which Currier & Ives bequeathed to America.