Fanny Palmer was one of Currier & Ives’ most important and prolific artists — and her oeuvre of nearly 300 prints gives the impression of artistic invincibility. But in the small book Currier & Ives (1950), Frederic A. Conningham notes: “The only type of work she did not do was the horse racing print. According to Louis Maurer who worked with her, the one thing Mrs. Palmer could not draw was a horse.”
Being able to draw a horse well was very important at Currier & Ives. When they finally closed their doors in 1907, Currier & Ives had published almost 700 prints of horses and horseracing — 10% of their total output. In Currier & Ives: Printmakers to the American People (1942), Harry T. Peters estimated that Currier & Ives produced more horse prints than all of the other American lithographic firms combined. Their output makes sense given the ubiquity of horses in both urban and rural America — in 1867, there were 8 million horses in America for a population of about 31 million. The nation’s obsession with horse racing also exploded in popularity at this time, creating demand for specific portraits of famous stallions and mares.
If anyone at Currier & Ives was in a position to judge a well-drawn horse, it was Louis Maurer; he was one of the primary artists of horses on staff. When Nathaniel Currier first saw Maurer’s skill drawing horses, he reportedly gave him an immediate raise.
A firm grasp on equine anatomy would seem to be essential to a successful horse picture. The Louis Maurer Collection at the American Antiquarian Society includes multiple pencil sketches of horses.

Kitty [Graphite, watercolor and wash on paper, undated]. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Preparing for Market [Lithograph, N. Currier, 1856]. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Palmer’s American Farm Yard – Morning (1857) turns out to be quite similar to Preparing for Market, and the horses look acceptable.

American Farm Yard – Morning [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1857]. Courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.

American Farm Yard – Evening [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1857]. Courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.
Palmer’s horses typically have curving soft bodies, less realistic frames, and more cartoonish appearances. They often look slow-moving, like sleepy side notes amid the country scenery, as in Palmer’s The Cattskill [sic] Mountains (1860).

The Cattskill [sic] Mountains [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1860]. Courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.
At the same time, a number of Currier & Ives horse prints don’t look entirely realistic to the modern eye. Maurer’s horses in Sontag and Flora Temple (1855) reflect an artistic style common to many Currier & Ives’s horse prints.

Sontag and Flora Temple. At the half mile pole in 1:13!! In their great match for $2000. Over the Union course L.I. May 7th. 1855 [Lithograph, N. Currier, 1855]. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Lady Suffolk. By Engineer, dam by Plato … [Lithograph by Capewell & Kimmel; reproduced in Frank Forester’s Horse and Horsemanship of the United States … v.2. by Henry William Herbert, 1857]. Courtesy of Tufts University.
Horses are animated animals, from their expressive eyes down to their twitching tails. There are so many rapidly changing components in the movement of a horse, especially in the placement of the four legs when moving, that it all can seem a bit awkward when isolated in a two-dimensional image. Until Eadweard Muybridge’s groundbreaking 1878 Horses in Motion, there wasn’t even agreement on how a horse’s legs actually moved while galloping.

The horse in motion, illus. by Muybridge. “Sallie Gardner,” owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19 June 1878: 2 frames showing diagram of foot movements. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
So when an artist like Robert Clarke could convincingly capture a horse’s “style of going,” concessions could be made for limitations in anatomical realism.
What’s the verdict when we isolate the horses in some of Fanny Palmer’s prints? To varying degrees, her horses often lack both motion and realism:
Currier & Ives wanted horses of movement. As Harry S. Peters surmised about the popularity of their horse prints: “The great sales impetus of these prints was perhaps aided by the American desire, then as now, for displays of speed.”
Below, for your enjoyment, is just a very small sampling of Currier & Ives horse prints produced by artists like Maurer, John Cameron, and Thomas Worth.

Louis Maurer, Life in the Country. “The Morning Ride” [Lithograph, N. Currier, 1859]. Courtesy of the Yale Art Gallery.

Louis Maurer after J. H. Wright, Rysdyk’s Hambletonian [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1876]. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

John Cameron, The Famous Trotting Gelding Guy by Kentucky Prince [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1888]. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

John Cameron, Ready for the Signal. The Celebrated Running Horse Harry Basset, By Lexington … [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1872]. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

John Cameron, Fast Trotters on Harlem Lane N.Y. [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1870]. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

Otto Knirsch after Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, The Prairie Hunter: “One Rubbed Out!” [Lithograph, N. Currier, 1852]. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Thomas Worth, A Brush on the Road, Mile Heats, Best Two in Three [Lithograph, N. Currier, 1855]. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Louis Maurer, A Race For Blood! [Lithograph, Currier & Ives, 1890]. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Note: The collage of Fanny Palmer’s horses in Currier & Ives prints was collected from open-source images published in Fanny Palmer: The Life and Works of a Currier & Ives Artist.