The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 37, no. 4

JOHAN HENRICH OTTO Fraktur Motifs, about 1780-90
NATHANIEL CURRIER The Favorite Cat, about 1840-50
The Favorite Cat captures the essence of
the animal in a manner associated more
with country or "naive" artists than with
the firm of Nathaniel Currier, later
Currier & Ives. Its bold iconic frontality
has an abstractio not normally found in
the lithographs of these famous printmakers.
The palest watercolor washes give
did the design above. He may have come
from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, and he
worked in Lancaster and Bucks counties
between 1772 and 1778. Watercolors of
this type are called frakturs because they
usually adorn documents-such as birth
and marriage certificates-bearing the old
German script of that name. This one is
flowers were probably done purely for the
artist's amusement. Created primarily for
the Pennsylvania German community,
fraktur continued a tradition dating back
to illuminated manuscripts of the middle
ages. This work, which was gradually
supplanted by printing techniques, is a
rare example of pure folk art, or that