Hattie Hen's Red Umbrella: 04/03/25

Hattie Hen's Red Umbrella by The Ryans (1950) is a thin picture book published by Whitman Publishing Co. I came across it via a saved eBay search. Curious, I purchased a copy.

Hattie Hen, Trudy Turkey, and a pig friend, agree to meet for a picnic lunch. Hattie seeing clouds decides to wear her rain boots and to bring her red umbrella. Her two friends tease her until sure enough it starts to rain. Her umbrella is large enough to accommodate all three and they have a lovely picnic despite the weather.

The book hardly feels like a book in its construction. It's made of paper and stapled. It's long and skinny and cut into an interesting shape. It looks and feels like a pamphlet — a pamphlet that happens to be a picture book.

Besides the oddity of its construction, the book further stands out for it's amazing illustrations. The author/illustrators labeled only as "The Ryans" were a husband and wife team, Beatrice and Frederick Ryan. There's a brief biography of them on askART.

My guess is these illustrations, which appear to be full color paintings, took time to make. More importantly they took money to print. It makes sense that the corners would be cut (literally and figuratively) on the construction of the books to put the money into these beautiful full color prints.

It was after all images of the artwork that convinced me to buy a copy. The Ryans created farm animal characters who were ornately dressed in Victorian style clothing. It's a 1950's approach to what I'm doing now with my chicken-people paintings.

Five stars

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