A beautiful pair – Vintage Wall Art
![A beautiful pair, New York : Published by Currier & Ives, [1871], c1872. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/29/2971d7cb7dfd-L.webp)
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
Few images capture their era like this antique lithograph of A beautiful pair. The original is held by the Library of Congress, so what you hang is a true record of its time.
Order it framed and ready to hang, or unframed to match a frame you already love. Perfect for a home, office, library or classroom wall, and a gift with a story behind it. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past has been bringing history to the wall since 2001, for tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
A beautiful pair
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A beautiful pair is less a scene of street life than a shop-window joke about fashion, and its subject is the footwear trade in the early 1870s. Currier & Ives, the New York firm that sold cheap hand-colored lithographs to a broad American public, issued many prints of this kind, using stylized women and everyday retail settings to comment on what shoppers were buying and why. The print's catalog entry places it among the firm's genre pictures of the 1870s, a period when fashionable women's boots and slippers were prized for their small size and fine finish. Look closely at the hand coloring, which the firm's workers applied by stencil and brush and which gives the image its bright, rather theatrical finish.
| Created / published | New York : Published by Currier & Ives, [1871], c1872. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph, hand col. |
| Genre | Lithographs Hand colored 1870-1880. |
| Notes | Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit, MI : Gale Research, c1983, no. 0511. |
| Subjects | Shoe stores--1870-1880. Women--Clothing & dress--1870-1880. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,049 px · prints to 5 × 3 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-174123 |
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