Currier & Ives sold fantasy and it sold reality.
And that’s generally the approach the lithographic company took to Ireland.
Kevin O’Rourke has written: “Irish-Americans have often seemed to believe that once upon a time they were a noble people who lived in a fairy-tale country.”
In his book “Courier and Ives: The Irish and America” — published in 1995 and still available — he wrote that some of the company's images “are clearly fanciful visions of reality” that reinforce the myth. Others are more realistic; although, in one instance, that of Currier & Ives’ “The Giant’s Causeway,” the print is “less astonishing than the sensations one actually has standing before this remarkable geological formation.”
“This wasn’t like Thomas Nast,” said Robert Newman, the president of the Old Print Shop, citing the cartoonist’s notoriously anti-Irish and anti-Catholic work in publications. (For the main story about the Old Print Shop, click here.)
While it was generally business as usual with regard to bigotry towards Blacks, Currier & Ives understood that the Irish were a market that could be tapped.
O’Rourke, a now retired New York lawyer originally from Silvermines, Co. Tipperary, pointed out that the company’s heyday, from the late 1840s through the 1890s, were the very decades the Irish were pouring into New York City.
Scenes from Irish-American life and others from Irish history were part of the Courier & Ives mix, and as also were the great heroes of Ireland, such as Robert Emmett, Daniel O’Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell and many more.
“This was not mere pandering to an audience on the part of Courier and Ives,” O’Rourke said, a long-time collector. “Many of the patriots of the Irish cause, such as Thomas Francis Meagher, had careers on this side of the Atlantic and many fought on the side of freedom here.”
Kevin O’Rourke’s email address is bornaglan@aol.com.
