They are a long way from the iconic pop art for which he is best known but a set of illustrations for a children's book series by Andy Warhol are set to go up for auction in New York next month.
Warhol's pictures illustrate the story of the little red hen, a folk tale about the value of team work, and show a perky little red hen happily sowing her grains of wheat, as a lazy cat, mouse and dog – who is reading the paper – look on. They were drawn by Warhol early in his career, between 1957 and 1959, for the Doubleday Book Club's popular series Best in Children's Books.
The Warhol illustrations will be auctioned on 9 December as part of Bloomsbury Auctions's sale of 365 original illustrations and books, alongside a host of pictures and letters from 19th-century fairytale illustrator Arthur Rackham, a privately printed edition of Beatrix Potter's The Tailor of Gloucester, rare Oz books by L Frank Baum and the artistic estate of award-winning African American children's illustrator Tom Feelings.
A collection of correspondence between Roald Dahl and his publisher Alfred A Knopf, with a guide price of $1,000-$1,500 (£600-£900), sees the author talk about his recent trip to a spiritual healer, as well as his enjoyment of his latest work. "But you know, these damn children's books are such fun to do, they get you by the throat," Dahl writes.
An "extremely rare" edition of Maurice Sendak's first picture book Good Shabbos, Everybody – commissioned after the illustrator Leonard Weisgard saw one of Sendak's window displays for FAO Schwartz in New York – is also on offer, as well as a poster Sendak drew for a 1979 New York book festival, showing a Wild Thing relaxing against the Empire State Building, eating a (big) apple and reading Villette.
A guide price of $35,000-$45,000 has been put on two watercolours and two pencil studies Sendak did for a Wild Thing balloon for Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in 1998, one of which is annotated "the tail is not properly placed – as you can see!"
"The sale will showcase important works from the Golden Age of Illustration to the present day," said Bloomsbury Auctions in an announcement.