More free images
Nathaniel Currier was born 27 March 1813 in Massachusetts, son of Nathaniel and Hannah Currier. James Merrit Ives was born in New York in 1824; his father had been superintendent of Bellevue Hospital.1
Currier & Ives lithograph
Between the founding of the firm and its dissolution in 1907, Currier & Ives produced more than 7,500 different lithographs that sold more than a million copies.2
Persistently used for greeting cards and more,3 avidly sought after by collectors,4 Currier & Ives lithographs are among the truly iconic images of an America gone by.
And more than 1,600 of those images are available online, free for the taking, at the website of the Library of Congress.
Including several The Legal Genealogist, for one, wouldn’t mind using for holiday cards and greetings… or to illustrate a blog post.
Remember the law here: anything published in the United States before 1923 is now out of copyright.5 It can be used, reused, modified and republished, because it’s now in the public domain.6
All Currier & Ives lithographs were published before 1923. So they are all out of copyright, all in the public domain.
And because these out-of-copyright items are available at the Library of Congress, we as genealogists don’t have to be concerned about that website’s terms of use — those pesky contract-type restrictions on what the website will allow us to do with its content.7 That’s because the terms of use of the Library of Congress are basically three-fold: (1) don’t violate anybody’s copyright; (2) don’t invade the privacy of individuals whose information might be found in the Library materials; and (3) don’t mess with the site itself.8
So have at it. Here are just some examples of what you can find, at this time of year, in the Currier & Ives collection at the Library of Congress:
Currier & Ives, “Winter in the country: a cold morning,” c18639
Currier & Ives, “Winter morning in the country,” c187310
Currier & Ives, “Central Park, Winter: The skating pond,” 186211
Currier & Ives, “Home in the wilderness,” c187012
And there are only 1,638 more for you to pick from…
SOURCES
- “Currier & Ives – The History of the Firm,” The Currier & Ives Foundation (http://www.currierandives.com/ : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- See e.g. Currier And Ives Cards, Zazzle.com (http://www.zazzle.com : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Information for collectors may be found at “Currier & Ives FAQs,” Currier & Ives: Perspectives on America (http://www.currierandives.org : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- See Peter B. Hirtle, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States,” Cornell Copyright Center (http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- See generally “Where is the public domain?,” Frequently Asked Questions: Definitions, U.S. Copyright Office (http://www.copyright.gov : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- See Judy G. Russell, “A terms of use intro,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 27 Apr 2012 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Judy G. Russell, “Library of Congress terms of use,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 18 Jul 2012 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Currier & Ives, “Winter in the country: a cold morning,” c1863; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Currier & Ives, “Winter morning in the country,” c1873; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Currier & Ives, “Central Park, Winter: The skating pond,” 1862; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
- Currier & Ives, “Home in the wilderness,” c1870; Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov : accessed 17 Dec 2012). ↩
Thank you for the beautiful Christmas present, all 1,600+ of them
You are most welcome! Isn’t the Library of Congress terrific?
I agree. Great photos, Judy – thanks for showing several lovely photos from the collection. I’m heading over to drool over a few myself! Cheers.
It’s always such a pleasure to come across great resources with few restrictions, Celia! Hope you find some images there!
This has become one of my favorite blogs . It’s one of the very few I actually subscribe by email because I never want to miss what you are up to! The articles are always thought-provoking and fascinating. Since your article on copyrights , I started rechecking all my blog posts and also now started sourcing my articles. I clearly have some work to do.
Thanks for posting these Currier & Ives Illustrations. In the breakfast room at my childhood home, my Mom found Currier & Ives prints (from an antique magazine ??) and framed them so I was surrounded by these beauties of Currier & Ives every morning. I do not know what happened to those pictures but I love looking at them here on my computer. Merry Christmas, Judy .
Thanks so very much for the kind words, Magda! Much appreciated.
what did the currier and ives pictures look like to you. do you remeber the size or what the colors looked like. i have been told the lithogrephd have a lot of black dots that connect the colors . then the prints have less consistent dots and slassed . all the information on my collection looks authenthic. whether a print of a lithograph. the titles are american winter scenes evening and morning by fannie palmer and two more by george durrie. anyone you can point me to authenticate them i would appreciate. i am leraning something new everyday. thank you for you time and your interest in these pieces of art. hope to hear from you,
rebecca
Rebecca, I am looking at the images in digital format, which means they’re relatively low resolution and I’m certainly not in any position to discern an original from a copy. You’d need to consult an art historian. Perhaps you could speak with the art department in your local community or state college and get a reference to someone who would be better able to help. Good luck to you.
Why would a Currier &Ives with the goverment copyright notice,NY address and published by Currier&Ives Homestead Winter have an HFA copyright mark within the lower left side of print itself?
Where did you see this, and what is HFA?
Don’t know if you still check this, but if I have a book of Currier and Ives images that was printed In 1942 can I scan those images and use them for commercial use?
It’s likely going to depend on whether those specific images were published before 1942 or first published in that book. If these are simply reprints of images published earlier, then they are in the public domain (free for us to use without permission). If they were first published in 1942, they may still be protected by copyright. So you might find it easier — and it’ll certainly be safer — to see if these images are included in the LOC collection.