There are artists in our collection we know well — their training, their influences, where they lived and worked. Renée Barnes is not one of them. What we have instead are four lithographs, a pair of documents, and a copyright date: 1936.
Paired with some internet searches on Depression-era toys, the gaps fill in more than you'd expect.
The Artwork
The four prints are Humpty Dumpty Circus, Three Happy Pigs, Bunny Taxi Service, and Nancy Lee's Playmates. Each is numbered sequentially — 719, 720, 721, 722 — and each carries Barnes's signature in the lower right in a confident, unhurried cursive. They were copyrighted in 1936, making them some of the oldest pieces in our inventory, by the United States Printing & Lithograph Co. and published by Catalda Fine Arts of New York.
The subjects are toys that appear to have been popular in the 1930s: Dutch-style cloth dolls, a flat wooden pull-toy bunny, painted circus animals, ceramic pig figurines, a spotted hobby horse, a Kewpie-style doll. Barnes painted them with the same careful attention she brought to her oil landscapes and floral still lifes — the light and shadow are considered, the textures are rendered with care, the compositions are deliberate. These are not quick commercial illustrations. They are paintings of toys, made by someone who gave them the same attention she brought to her other work.
The four prints share a consistent palette and mood. They belong together visually in a way that suggests they were conceived as a series, though no documentation we have confirms that directly. What we can say is that Catalda numbered and sold them as a group, and that they arrived together in our inventory in 1980 as part of the same purchase.
Toys of the 1930s
Part of what makes these prints compelling as historical documents is that the toys Barnes depicted are identifiable — or nearly so — as real objects from 1930s American childhood. Each print invites a closer look.
Humpty Dumpty Circus
The painted wooden circus animals — elephant, horses, clown — in Humpty Dumpty Circus are visually consistent with the Schoenhut Humpty Dumpty Circus sets that were among the most beloved American toys of the early twentieth century. The Schoenhut company produced these jointed wooden circus figures from 1903 through the mid-1930s, and by 1936 they would have been a familiar presence in many American nurseries, often passed down from older siblings or parents. We cannot confirm the attribution with certainty, but the visual correspondence is close enough to note.
Three Happy Pigs
The ceramic pig figurines in Three Happy Pigs bear a strong resemblance to the Three Little Pigs merchandise that flooded American homes following the release of Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies short in 1933. The film was a cultural phenomenon, and pig-themed toys and figurines proliferated throughout the mid-1930s. Barnes was painting in 1936 — at the height of that wave. Whether the figurines she depicted were Disney-licensed products or independent ceramic pigs made in the same spirit, the cultural context is unmistakable. The dreamy, layered background — soft arches in peach, yellow, and green — is the most abstract element in any of the four prints, and gives the composition a strong storybook quality.
Bunny Taxi Service
The two Dutch-style cloth dolls in Bunny Taxi Service — a boy and a girl in bright primary colors, with round painted faces and slightly glazed expressions — are visually very close to the Norah Wellings Dutch cloth dolls that were widely produced and exported from Britain in the 1930s. Wellings was a celebrated British doll designer whose soft cloth figures were popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether Barnes was painting Wellings dolls specifically or a similar Dutch-style cloth doll from another maker, the type is consistent with what would have been in an American child's toy box in 1936. The flat wooden pull-toy bunny on wheels to the right is a more generic form — pull-toy animals of this kind were produced by dozens of manufacturers — but rendered with the same affectionate precision as the dolls.
Nancy Lee's Playmates
The title of the fourth print is the most intriguing of the four, and the one we can say the least about with confidence. The toys depicted — a spotted hobby horse, a round Kewpie-style figure, and a soft rag doll with blonde braids — are types rather than identifiable specific products. But the name "Nancy Lee" raises its own question: who, or what, is Nancy Lee?
A few possibilities are worth noting. "Nancy Lee" was a culturally common name for an American girl of this era — Barnes may simply have been naming an imagined child owner of the toys, with the title meaning these are the playthings that belong to a child called Nancy Lee. Alternatively, the Arranbee Doll Company of New York produced a popular composition doll called Nancy Lee beginning around 1937 — one of the premier American girl dolls of the late 1930s, known for her large eyes, blonde hair, and braided wigs. The rag doll with braids in the print is a soft cloth doll rather than a composition doll, so it does not fit with the Arranbee Nancy Lee style specifically, but the name and the doll type are close enough in cultural moment to be worth noting. There is also Nancy Ann Storybook Dolls, a San Francisco company founded in 1936 that produced small bisque storybook dolls with a similar girlish aesthetic, though the toys in the print do not match that product closely. We simply do not know which Nancy Lee Barnes had in mind — or whether the name was purely invented. If you recognize the toys or the name from doll history, we'd genuinely like to hear from you.
The Paper Trail
Our collection includes two letters that together tell the story of how these prints came to us and what rights attach to them.
The first is dated December 22, 1980, and is written on letterhead from Etcetera Wall Decor, Inc., the parent company of Catalda Fine Arts. It is addressed to Dana V. Mayes, President of Pink Flamingos, Inc., Sacramento, California — my father. The letter confirms a closeout purchase of 10,000 Hencke/Barnes prints for $500, packed in protective wrappers and described as in perfect condition. It specifies that the sale includes "all rights to reproduction, and a release to the printer now holding the plates or negatives." The prints were shipped F.O.B. New York City by common carrier. While 10,000 were purchased over 40 years ago, only about 1,500 divided between the ten subjects remain in our inventory.
The second letter is dated June 29, 1982. It is two sentences. Written on Catalda Fine Arts letterhead, signed by Harry M. Segal, President: "Please be advised that the copyrights were not renewed. You have our authorization to republish."
Those two sentences are the reason we can offer reproductions of Barnes's work alongside the originals. They are also, in their brevity, a small piece of publishing history — a formal transfer of rights conducted entirely in the space of a Post-it note's worth of text.
A Partial Portrait
Renée Barnes (1886–1940) was an American artist active in Indiana and Michigan. Auction records show she worked in oil — landscapes and floral still lifes, primarily — and her work has appeared at Ripley Auctions and Alderfer Auction with works dated to 1928 and 1930. AskART lists thirteen auction lots for her in total. That is the extent of the public record.
We do not know how Barnes came to work with Catalda Fine Arts, whether the nursery prints were a commission or her own initiative, or whether there are other Barnes titles beyond these four. We do not know much about her life outside of her dates and her geography. She is, as far as we can tell, an artist whose paintings have outlasted the documentation of her career — which is not unusual for American commercial illustrators of the 1930s, and is its own kind of loss.
If you know something about Renée Barnes — her training, her biography, her connection to Catalda, or any other prints attributed to her — we would genuinely like to hear it. Leave a note in the comments or reach out through the contact page. We'll update this post as we learn more.
Barnes Prints Today: Reception in the Modern Era
Humpty Dumpty Circus is the print that gets noticed. The owner of our local shipping store — where every order that leaves Pink Flamingos passes through — fell for it the first time she saw it coming across her counter. It has that quality: busy and warm and slightly theatrical, the kind of image that rewards looking.
Three Happy Pigs is my personal favorite. The background in particular — those soft layered arches in peach and yellow and green, more abstract than anything else in the series — gives the composition a dreamlike quality that sits interestingly against the painted realism of the pig figurines in the foreground. I also love it for its recognizable fairy tale, a playful image to point to when telling the story about the big, bad wolf that puffed and puffed but couldn't blow down that house of brick.
Bunny Taxi Service and Nancy Lee's Playmates are the two I find most fascinating, and I'll admit also the most entertainingly unsettling. The Dutch dolls in Bunny Taxi Service, with their painted faces and slightly glazed expressions, and the Kewpie and rag doll grouping in Nancy Lee's Playmates have an uncanny stillness — the result of someone painting what was actually there. Artistic sensibilities shift across generations; what unsettles a modern eye was simply a child's everyday world in 1936.
Two of the prints — Three Happy Pigs and Humpty Dumpty Circus — spent years on my children's walls. My parents framed them in red and gave them as gifts when my oldest was born. They moved from his room to my daughter's room to my youngest son's room as the children grew. Our little vintage art business and the family have always wound together, and this is one of the places it shows. If any of the four prints have caught your attention, the originals are available in the shop — authentic Depression-era lithographs, mint condition, exactly as they left the press in 1936. For those who'd prefer something more durable or customizable, we also offer reproductions in a range of sizes and printing materials.
Once upon a wall, these prints hung in nurseries across America. They can again.
