The darktown fire brigade-to the rescue! – Antique Print
![The darktown fire brigade-to the rescue!, [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1884. — antique lithograph](https://images.jameslantos.com/img/42/42a5c8cb17ff-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
The darktown fire brigade-to the rescue! comes to life in this antique lithograph, reproduced from the original with every detail intact. 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. It brings character to any room and makes a memorable gift. Free shipping in the lower 48 states. Snapshots of the Past, founded in 2001, has served tens of thousands of customers worldwide.
The darktown fire brigade-to the rescue!
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Few pictures in the Darktown series are as openly mocking as this one, which casts a Black fire brigade as a crowd of comic figures responding to a blaze. Issued by the New York firm Currier & Ives in 1884, it belongs to a run of lithographs that turned Black urban life into slapstick, using exaggerated features and dialect captions drawn from minstrel-show conventions. The series sold widely and is now studied as evidence of how racist stereotypes were mass-marketed in the decades after Reconstruction. Today it is best read as a document of that prejudice rather than a record of the people it ridicules.
| Created / published | [New York] : Currier & Ives, 1884. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 print : lithograph. |
| Genre | c1983 |
| Notes | Caricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,536 × 1,073 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-174316 |
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