The farmers daughter / lith. & pub. by Currier & Ives.

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Currier & Ives, the New York firm that dominated American popular printmaking in the later nineteenth century, issued this colored lithograph of a rural young woman, catalogued as number 242 in its series. The firm produced sentimental genre scenes like this one in large numbers, selling them cheaply to households and shops across the country. Pictures of farm girls and rural women appealed to urban buyers who imagined the countryside as wholesome and simple, while the lithographic process let the publisher reproduce a single design many times with hand-applied color. The print's exact date is uncertain, as the record gives only a span between 1850 and 1900.

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