Henry McCarter’s small-format poster, intended to be displayed in the windows of booksellers, advertises The Green Tree Library, an imprint of Stone & Kimball publishers of Chicago; the imprint published a series of 10 volumes of the work of avant-garde contemporary European authors like Maurice Maeterlinck and Henrik Ibsen. McCarter had studied painting at the Pennsylvania of Fine Art under the great realist painter Thomas Eakins, graduating in 1883. But he moved to Paris to study in 1887, and at one point apprenticed in the lithography workshop of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. By the time he returned to the United States, his work was infused with a new modern sensibility, and he became a hugely successful illustrator for Scribner’s, The Century, and Harper’s, among other publications. His design for The Green Tree Library showing a stylized image of chickens roosting in a tree, reflects the imprint’s modern ambitions; it suggests the influence of both Japanese color woodblocks and of the British Arts and Crafts movement, particularly the wallpaper and textile designs of C. F.A. Voysey and William Morris.