Silky Hen, from the Prize and Game Chickens series (N20) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes

Art Historical Context

This charming 1891 color lithograph, titled *Silky Hen*, belongs to Allen & Ginter’s “Prize and Game Chickens” series (N20), a set of small trading cards inserted into cigarette packages. Produced by the Gast Lithograph & Engraving Company for the Richmond-based tobacco firm, the card measures just 2¾ by 1½ inches yet captures the fluffy plumage and alert posture of its subject with crisp, vibrant detail. Such cards were early examples of mass-market color printing, designed to entice customers and encourage collecting. As commercial ephemera, the piece reflects the late-nineteenth-century boom in American advertising, when cigarette manufacturers turned everyday objects into miniature works of art. The series celebrated prized poultry breeds, appealing to both urban smokers and rural enthusiasts at a time when poultry shows were popular spectacles. Today, *Silky Hen* resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Jefferson R. Burdick Collection, where these once-disposable prints are recognized for documenting both graphic design history and popular culture of the Gilded Age.

About the Artist

Allen & Ginter|The Gast Lithograph & Engraving Company

Allen & Ginter, the pioneering American tobacco firm based in Richmond, Virginia, emerged around 1880 from the partnership of John F. Allen and Lewis Ginter, evolving from Allen's earlier John F. Allen & Company. Allen retired in 1882, succeeded by John Pope, yet the brand endured under Ginter's leadership, employing over 1,100 workers—mostly women—for hand-rolled cigarettes by 1886. Ginter, a Dut...