Growing up surrounded by vintage art means some pieces just become part of the background of your life — not hung on a specific wall, not attached to a single moment, just always there. That's how it was with Hencke for me. His nursery prints were a recurring presence throughout my childhood, passing through rooms and years the way certain objects do in families that keep things.
There are other prints from that era I remember more specifically. The Stardust IV and V prints by Albo — celestial, dreamlike, horizontally wide in a way that makes them unlike anything else in the collection — were gifted to my firstborn Seamus by his grandparents Dana and Judy, custom framed. When his sister Caitlin arrived three and a half years later, the set passed to her; when her brother Monty was born five years after that, they passed to him. Each child grew into them and then out of them in turn. The prints are in my garage now, set aside as a demo for in-person selling — which feels like a fitting next chapter for something that spent so many years in a child's room.
With Hencke, the memory is less attached to a single moment, but the affection was always there. His prints were simply part of the world I grew up in, and I never needed to be convinced of their value. When it came time to decide what to preserve and how, Hencke was among the first things I wanted to get right. As it turned out, the groundwork for that had been laid more than forty years earlier.
A Letter to New York, 1982
In June of 1982, my father Dana V. Mayes — then President of Pink Flamingos, Inc., operating out of Sacramento — wrote a letter to Harry M. Segal, President of Catalda Fine Arts, at 48 East 21st Street in New York City. The question was straightforward: what was the copyright status of the Hencke and Barnes prints, and did any rights still existing pass to Pink Flamingos as part of their purchase?
Four days later, Harry Segal wrote back. "Please be advised that the copyrights were not renewed. You have our authorization to republish."
Both letters are still in our archive. I find them worth sharing — not just for what they confirm legally, but for what they say about how my father ran this business. He didn't assume. He asked, and he documented. Because he did, we have a clear, unambiguous chain of authorization that most sellers of vintage reproductions simply don't have. Despite gaining the authorization to reproduce these beautiful nursery prints, my parents never did, allowing this step to become part of my chapter.
That authorization covers both Hencke and the artist Renée Barnes, whose nursery prints share the same Catalda provenance — and whose story will get its own post here soon.
Letter from Dana V. Mayes, President of Pink Flamingos, Inc., to Harry M. Segal, President of Catalda Fine Arts, June 25, 1982.
Reply from Harry M. Segal, President of Catalda Fine Arts, June 29, 1982. Catalda Fine Arts was a division of Etcetera Wall Decor, Inc., operating nationally from New York.
Who Was Albert Hencke?
Albert Hencke was born in 1865 and worked out of New Jersey until his death in 1936. His career unfolded during the Golden Age of American Illustration — roughly 1880 to 1920 — a period driven by a booming publishing industry. Advances in color lithography had made mass reproduction economical, and illustrated magazines, gift books, and decorative prints were reaching middle-class homes at a scale that hadn't been possible before. Artists who could work across multiple formats and subjects were in steady demand, and Hencke was among them.
He produced color plates for novels, pen-and-ink illustration for magazines, and fashionably dressed women in the same cultural vein as Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Girl" — both artists contributing to the era's visual vocabulary around femininity and style. But it's not that work that has lasted in the collector market. It's the children.
His scenes of children are considered the most collectible of all his work, and the reason is visible in the prints themselves. There's an ease to his figures — an unposed quality — that separates them from the more formal children's portraiture of the preceding Victorian era. His children exist fully in whatever world he's placed them in, absorbed in the moment rather than performing for the viewer.
The Quality I Keep Coming Back To
What I find most interesting about Hencke's child subjects is a quality I'd describe as androgynous openness. Take Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk: that child could be a boy or a girl. There's no insistence either way. In an era when children's illustration was often rigidly coded by gender, Hencke's figures read as simply children — curious, mid-adventure, fully themselves. Whether that was intentional or just the natural expression of his sensibility, I can't say. But it's one of the things that makes his work feel less dated than a lot of illustration from the same period.
It's also, if I'm honest, why Hencke is my personal favorite among the nursery artists in our collection. Barnes has a whimsy that I genuinely enjoy, and her prints were among those my parents had custom framed for me as a young mother — but it's the nostalgia in Hencke's work that speaks to me most directly. Different prints find different people, and that's as it should be.
Mary and Her Little Lamb: A Single Surviving Original
One of my favorite animals as a child was a lamb, which probably explains the particular pull I felt when I came across our sole copy of Mary and Her Little Lamb while working through the archive.
The print bears a copyright date of 1928 — confirmed by the Catalda Fine Arts, Inc. N.Y.C. imprint in the upper margin — which makes it nearly a hundred years old. We have only this one. The child in the image stands between birch trees in a pink dress, holding a small bouquet, her lamb turning toward her. After nearly a century of storage and moving, the colors have held. But the paper is fragile in the way that very old things are fragile, even when they've been well kept, and it has to ship flat.
Having it professionally scanned and restored was an obvious decision. The dust that had accumulated over those decades required careful digital cleaning — a process I've written about in detail in my post on working with Gango. The result is a faithful reproduction of a print that very few people will ever encounter in its original form.
Goosy Goosy Gander was in a similar position — very few originals, a strong image, a good case for making it available beyond the handful of surviving prints.
Mary and Her Little Lamb, copyright 1928, Catalda Fine Arts, Inc. N.Y.C. Catalda Print No. 833. Our sole surviving original.
On Fragile Things and Framing
The Hencke originals are among the oldest prints in our collection, and their condition — pristine as it is — means they have to ship flat. They can't be rolled. They require care in handling that not every home is set up for.
I think about this partly because I lived a version of it. When my children were small, I was the sole earner in our household, and custom framing — which vintage prints in non-standard sizes require, since off-the-shelf frames rarely fit — was simply out of reach. My parents understood this. The prints they had custom framed for me: the Albo Stardust pair, Barnes' Humpty Dumpty Circus and Three Happy Pigs, and Eugene Iverd's Admiration — were generous gifts that made those pieces accessible to me at a stage of life when I couldn't have managed it alone.
Not everyone has that. The print-on-demand framed canvas option exists, in part, because of that reality. It makes these images gift-ready in a way the originals can't be — ready to hang, ready to go directly into a nursery or a child's room, without the coordination and expense that custom framing requires. The Barnes Humpty Dumpty Circus and Three Happy Pigs are both available as framed canvases now, as are all of the Hencke prints, including the very special Mary and Her Little Lamb — which brings the Once Upon a Wall collection full circle, in a way, from the prints my parents preserved to the ones now ready to go straight onto a wall.
What Remains
Hencke's biographical record is thin. No personal correspondence survives that I've found — nothing like the Terone letters that gave me such a direct window into Cecilia's life. What remains is the work itself, the prints in this collection, and the authorization my father secured in 1982 that makes it possible to share them beyond the handful of surviving originals.
These prints are old, but they still have a future. A child who grows up seeing this charming artwork on their wall every day is being shaped by it in ways they won't fully recognize until much later — the same way I absorbed Hencke without studying him, and found decades later that the affection had never left.
You can explore the original vintage Jack and the Beanstalk lithograph or the framed canvas version, browse the full Albert Hencke collection, or explore everything in the Once Upon a Wall nursery collection. And if the name Renée Barnes is new to you — her post is coming.
Jack and the Beanstalk, Albert Hencke. A child mid-climb, mid-adventure — boy or girl, it's entirely up to you. I find that quietly wonderful.