Young boy with horn, wearing hat of Chief Engineer, proper left arm raised and hand held palm out toward viewer.
After Louis Maurer American, 1832-1932 The Little Fireman is one of several sentimental pictures created by Louis Maurer for Currier & Ives. Children were a favorite subject of 19th-century genre paintings. For middle-class Americans, childhood was a time when young girls and boys had the freedom to play and explore. Idealized portraits of children, produced by Currier & Ives, decorated the walls of America’s bedrooms and nurseries. In this image, a young boy is dressed as a fireman and is wearing a helmet that is inscribed, “Chief Engineer.” He holds a horn in his right hand and appears to be trying to capture someone’s attention. Maurer produced more than one hundred images for the lithography firm.
