Henriette Willebeek Le Mair

1889–1966

Henriette Willebeek Le Mair was born in Rotterdam to a wealthy family. Her parents were artists and often wrote verses for her to illustrate. Her first book, Première Rondes Enfantines, was published in France in 1904, when she was fifteen. In her early twenties, she opened an art school in her home and many of her students became models for her watercolor drawings.

Beginning in 1911, she published a number of books with the music publishers Augener, including Our Old Nursery Rhymes (1911), Little Songs of Long Ago (1912), The Children’s Corner (1914), Little People (1915), and Old Dutch Nursery Rhymes (1917). She also illustrated A Gallery of Children with a text by A. A. Milne in 1925 and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses in 1926.

Le Mair had a great interest in Eastern philosophy, and she and her husband, Baron van Tuyll van Serooskerken, converted to Sufism in the 1920s.

“Humpty Dumpty,” Our Old Nursery Rhymes, 1911

“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” Our Old Nursery Rhymes, 1911

“At the Seaside,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926

“The Land of Nod,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926

“Armies in the Fire,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926

“Time to Rise,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926

“The Swing,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926

“The Land of Counterpane,” A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1926