Milestones in 2026: Eighty for the Bestsellers, Seventy-Five and Ninety for Our Best-Kept Secrets
Every July I do the same thing: I turn a year older, and I go looking through the archive for prints hitting a milestone birthday of their own — a round number, five or ten years at a time, not just another year older. Some years turn up more of these than others; this year it's three groups of prints, at ninety years, eighty years, and seventy-five years since they came off the press. What makes this year's list interesting is the spread: the eighty-year group is made up of two of my actual bestsellers, while the ninety and seventy-five-year groups are some of the least-purchased, most overlooked prints in the whole archive.
1946: Eighty Years, and Two Everyone Already Knows
A couple of our bestsellers both land on the same year. The first is the Gould hummingbird set, printed in 1946 by I.B. Fischer Co. in New York. My dad, Dana Mayes, purchased this particular lot from Graphic Arts Unlimited in New York, New York, in November of 1981, and he always recommended framing them with an oval mat. I wrote about John and Elizabeth Gould's partnership — how Elizabeth's illustrations gave shape to John's fieldwork until her death in 1841, and how the hummingbird volumes that followed carried the standard she'd set — in The Audubon, Part II: The Brits.
The second is Flamingos by Roger Tory Peterson, printed the same year by the Quaker State Lithographing Company (and purchased by my dad on the same invoice as the Gould Hummingbirds!). Peterson's partnership with Quaker State's founder, Gertrude Gerstel Steinberg, started in 1942 and ran for nearly twenty years, which is how a lot of his early, Audubon-influenced work made it into wide circulation before his field guides made him famous. I told his story, from a seventh-grade Junior Audubon Club to the guides that changed how ordinary people learned to identify birds, in The Audubon, Part III: The American. Between the Gould Hummingbirds and Peterson's Flamingos, Pink Flamingos has sold over 80 pieces since the online chapter of our business started up three years ago.
1936: Ninety Years, and the Ones Almost No One's Found
The oldest group is a set of five nursery and children's lithographs, all copyrighted in 1936 by the United States Printing & Lithograph Co., and it's where the real best-kept secrets start. My parents purchased this lot from Catalda Fine Arts of New York, New York, in December of 1980. Four of them are by Renée Barnes, an artist we still know very little about — no biography, no training record, just four prints and a copyright date. I wrote the full story of what those four prints depict, and the surprising amount that Depression-era toy history fills in, in The Toys of the 1930s.
The fifth 1936 print is Admiration, by an artist who went by Eugene Iverd. That name was not the one he was born with. He was George Melvin Erickson, and as the family story goes—passed down and later published by his own granddaughter—he made a promise to his brother Carl that he'd one day become a famous artist, and when he did, he'd make Carl's name famous alongside his own. The trouble was that Carl disliked his middle name, Iverd, and George wasn't fond of a friend's name, Eugene, either. So he took the two names neither of them wanted and stitched them together into a pen name, turning a small private joke between brothers into the signature that ended up on Saturday Evening Post covers for a decade.
Under that borrowed name, Erickson spent ten years painting Post covers, mostly scenes of children, starting with his first acceptance in 1926. 1936 was his last year: he died that June, the same year Admiration was printed. Between Barnes and Iverd, this ninety-year group is also the oldest stock in the entire shop — and some of the least purchased, which doesn't track with how good the prints actually are.
1951: Seventy-Five Years, for the Right Kind of Wall
Sunderland Hills by James Ashley, published by Catalda Fine Arts, is an autumn landscape believed to be modeled on the town of Sunderland, Vermont — rolling hills, red barns, a white church. I haven't been able to track down much about Ashley beyond the print itself, which puts him in the same category as Renée Barnes: an artist whose work outlasted the record of who they were. I have a precious few number of these and believe they were provided to my parents in a large lot of miscellaneous prints they obtained from Catalda.
The other two 1951 prints are Watermelon and Lobster by Agnes Potter Lowrie, printed by Triton Press. Lowrie was a British-born American painter and printmaker who worked out of Chicago and Ohio and had work shown at the Whitney Museum in 1952, the year after these two were printed. Both run large — 25 by 33 inches and 24 by 35 — built for a kitchen or dining room rather than a nursery wall. Of everything on this year's list, the Lowries are the ones I'd most like to see find their way onto more walls. They are bold, funky, and rare, and they've had almost no attention at all.
Eighty, Ninety, Seventy-Five, and What It Says
These nine prints span three publishers, three decades, and two artists nobody's written a real biography of yet. It's a strange kind of milestone year — the ones everybody already owns turning eighty right alongside the ones almost nobody's discovered yet, at ninety and seventy-five. Next July, the count might be one anniversary or none, and the mix might look nothing like this one — but I'll be back in the archive checking regardless.
