In this print, a poor Irishman in tattered clothing stands on dock carrying his posessions in a cloth bindle. He reads a sign advertising the "Shamrock Line" of "American Packets," fast ocean-crossing ships that served passengers travelling between Dublin and New York. The work is a companion to "Homeward Bound (New York)" (50.587.6), and both are based on paintings by the Scottish-born Erskine Nichol. A genre painter who taught in Dublin during the Irish Famine, Nichol's works often respond to that tragedy.
The New York firm of Currier & Ives (established by Nathaniel Currier, who formed a partnership with his brother-in-law James Merritt Ives in 1857), lithographed 4,300 subjects between 1835 and 1907 for distribution across America and Europe. They offered images of almost everything animal, vegetable, or mineral in the United States, and issued landscapes, genre subjects, caricatures, portraits, historical scenes, foreign views and reproductions of art works. The pictures were drawn on lithographic stones, printed in monochrome, then generally hand-colored by women who worked for the firm at home.
Credit: The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954