When the Rain Raineth, from the series Three Young Rats and Other Rhymes

Alexander Calder made a series of 85 drawings to illustrate Three Young Rats and Other Rhymes, a whimsical book of anonymous nursery-rhymes edited by James Johnson Sweeney and published by the dealer Curt Valentin in 1944. The artist’s playful and sometimes humorous interpretations of the rhymes are rendered in a simplified and continuous linear style. These compositions recall Calder’s imaginative wire sculptures, impressively formed out of single pieces of thin wire to resemble line drawings in three-dimensional space.

The corresponding rhyme for this drawing reads:
When the rain raineth
And the Goose winketh,
Little wotteth the Gosling
What the Goose thinketh.