Viewing this contrast between the life of virtue and the ways of sin, who could doubt that Nathaniel Currier was on the side of the angels? If, today, the famous New York printmaker seems unduly pre-occupied with morality—or the absence of it—we must remember that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century lived closer to the God-fearing Puritan and his homilies. Perhaps it was no accident that the confident dove perched in the branches of the “Tree of Life” looked like the American eagle.
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