Color print of a bay mare (Flora Temple) and a colt in a grassy meadow.
Description
A hand colored print of a bay mare (Flora Temple) and colt, both with black manes and forelegs, standing together in a grassy meadow. A large three story wooden country home is seen in the background. Three men stand on the veranda, while another walks through the yard with a dog. A horse is being exercised in adjacent field. Wooden fences, trees, and shrubbery separate the fields.
Flora Temple was foaled in 1845 it Utica, New York from the sire Loomis Bogus and a dam named Madame Temple. By 1861 she had become a racing icon, the “Queen of the Turf” and was the second mare, after Lady Suffolk, to trot the mile in under 2:30. Flora equaled or lowered the record six times, continually beating her own best times. Flora Temple is the “Bob Tail Nag” referred to in the famous song “Camptown Races” by Stephen Foster, so popular that ships were named after her. After her death in 1877, she was inducted into the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 1955 as an “Immortal” because she won 92 races in her career. This image depicts Flora Temple at her last home, Erdenheim Stud Farm, owned by Aristides and Geroge Welch. She produced no offspring until 1869 when, at age 24, she was bred to the imported thoroughbred Leamington. Their foal, Prince Imperial was bred for speed, and while he trained, he never raced. He was sold to Robert Bonner, who used him as a road horse.
N. Mitton created the large folio lithograph “The Celebrated Trotting mare Flora Temple and Colt.” Mitton created this work and other lithographs in the 1860s (this particular one dates to 1869).
John Smith was a landscape, portrait, and equestrian lithographer and publisher. He is known for printing Tholey’s “Genl. Lafayette’s Departure from Mount Vernon, 1784” as well as Mitton’s “Celebrated Trotting Mare Flora Temple, 1869”. He is listed as living in Philadelphia, at 710 Sansom Street from 1863-1869.
Drape. Incomplete fabric drape. Drape in blue, gold, and black. It is the match 234919.0055a, but it is missing significant amounts of the outer brocade fabric and is has be unstitched from its intended shape. The top 13 ¾” of the drape is complete, below that the outer brocade has been cut away for the next 42 ¾ inches. The tope of the drape has 4 knife pleats. The cream wool interlining of the is visible majority of the drape’s length. The brocade starts after the bottom section. The fringe was not cut with the brocade, so there is a length of warp-face tape with self-fringe that is loose. It used to extend to the top of the drape. The drape had been gathered and stitched together to drape decoratively, but the stitching has been undone to create a flat length of fabric. There is scaring from where stiches used to be. Along the bottom section of the Some of velvet stripe is missing, it has been cut. The cord that runs along the top and bottom of the stripe has been unpicked. The bottom of the drape has been left intact. It has the same warp-face tape and alternating tied tassels as 234919.0055a. Along with the drape, there is a loose piece of fabric 23 ½ x 8 approximately. It is of the same brocade as the drape and came from the middle section of the drape where the brocade was removed.
This drape (part of a set 234919.0055a-k) was donated by the daughters of Walter Tuckerman, a prominent man in the banking, real estate, and naturalist world of Maryland in the 20th century. In his early adulthood, he was part of the Alaskan Border Survey Commission in 1909. His letters home are full of optimism and wonder at the wilderness of Alaska, he even received the honor of a mountain named after him, Mt. Tuck. After he returned from Alaska, he founded The Bank of Bethesda in Bethesda, Maryland. Tuckerman also led the development of the nearby neighborhood of Edgemoor in Bethesda, Maryland. His daughters donated the drapes with a note stating that they came “from our parent’s house” (page 178 of scanned accession file). It is likely that the house in question was the family home called Tuxeden in Bethesda. Walter Tuckerman's lifelong love of adventure and the outdoors became a love of golf later in his life. he was an active member of his local golf club, and he won many trophies.
Color print of an iron works consisting of three buildings in a clearing in a hilly wooded area surrounded by numerous auxillary buildings and houses. Railroad tracks run in foreground of view with a spur running up a steep grade to the works. A station labeled "Greenwood" sits beside the tracks.
Color print depicting a bird's eye view of a city (Hoboken) on a river with a harbor filled with sailing vessels. A large park in the foreground contains public buildings. On the right there are blocks of multi-story row houses with churches and more open spaces in the distance.
Color print of a cobblestone street with buildings on each side and a brick church at the end of the street. A hay wagon pulled by two horses is stopped near the church. Other buildings are visible in the distance.
Color print of a rural scene. Two cows on a winding road, bordered on the left by a stone wall, and the right by a two-story farm house. Hilly terrain with a wide river and buildings in background.
Colored memorial print of a weeping woman standing beside a monument topped with a large urn. Behind the monument is a weeping willow tree. A river flows in the background.
A black and white print of a race between two hack horses and jockeys. The horse in the lead is cutting across the other’s path. The jockey in the rear draws the reins sharply to prevent a collision. The dress and caption mark the jockeys as Irishmen.
F&S Palmer was a lithographic company in New York City run by Seymour and Fanny Palmer from 1846-1849. Fanny Palmer was a landscape and townscape painter employed by Currier and Ives. Though they were partners (and married), Seymour was fiscally irresponsible so the burden of raising the family and running the business fell on Fanny. Seymour is also known as Edward S. Palmer, and died in 1859. Fanny died in 1876.
This political cartoon satirizes the 1856 Presidential race, in which Colonel John Charles Fremont ran as the first candidate of the newly-formed Republican Party. By referring to the Presidential election as Fremont’s “Last Grand Exploring Expedition,” the print references the Colonel’s earlier expeditions into the American West as the “Pathfinder.” Fremont sits upon a horse with the head of Horace Greeley, labeled as the “Abolition Nag.” William Seward leads the horse towards “Salt River,” or a metaphor for political demise. Greeley questions Seward, remarking that, “it seems to me we are going down the same road we did in ‘Fifty two.’” During the 1852 election, the Philadelphia-based lithographer John Childs had published a visually similar print in which the Whig nominee, General Winfield Scott, is led towards Salt River.
The new Republican Party ran on an anti-slavery platform, with the slogan “Free Soil, Free Men, and Fremont.” Fremont and his party challenged the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which employed the doctrine of popular sovereignty to allow the people living in these territories to vote them into the Union as either slave or free states. This resulted in the outbreak of violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in the Kansas Territory, earning it the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregationalist clergyman, raised funds to buy rifles for abolitionist forces in Kansas, and these guns became known as “Beecher’s Bibles.” Beecher campaigned for Fremont during the election, and stands behind him in the print, carrying a half dozen rifles. On the far right, a frontiersman, presumably Kit Carson, who accompanied Fremont on his exploring expeditions, warns the Colonel that he has fallen in with “a bad crowd.” Instead, he suggests that it would be better for the nation if Fremont abandoned his party’s attachment to the abolitionist cause, an unlikely prospect given his and his wife’s unshakeable anti-slavery positions. This anti-Republican print reveals how divisive the issue of slavery was to voters in the years leading up to the Civil War.
Nathaniel Currier (1813-1888) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and after serving an apprenticeship in Boston, he moved to New York City in 1834. In New York, he briefly partnered with Adam Stodart, but their firm dissolved within a year, and Currier went into business on his own until 1857. In that year he partnered with his bookkeeper, James M. Ives (1824-1895), forming the famous lithography firm of Currier and Ives, which continued under their sons until 1907.
