Rose O'Neill was - and to an extent still is - famous for the creation of the androgynous
little cherubs known as the Kewpies. But their success tends to obscure other less
well known sides to her illustrative talent which I want to feature more prominently here.
She was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in1874, the oldest of 6 children, and in childhood
her parents encouraged her obvious talent for drawing and creative writing.
The family relocated to Omaha, Nebraska, and without any formal art training whatsoever
at the age of 19 she travelled with her father to New York in 1893 in the hope of getting
her career as an illustrator off the ground. She boarded at the convent of the Sisters
of St. Regis, and made appointments to show her her portfolio of illustrations at the
offices of the city's many publishers. She was soon taking commissions for magazine
work and in 1896 she became the first American woman to have a comic strip published. This
is unfortunately the best resolution image I could find, but there are other examples
from around the same time published in the magazine Truth.
It was also in 1896 she married Gray Latham, a man she had known earlier in Omaha. But
it didn't take long for her to realise it had been a mistake, when he started spending
all his time and a lot of her money on gambling and other vices.
But her popularity as an illustrator for magazines continued to grow and she sent quite a lot
of the money she was earning back to her family. Her father used it to buy a small tract of
land in the Ozarks of southern Missouri, and built a house there, which the family christened
Bonniebrook. By the later years of the 19th century O'Neill
was working as a staff artist for the popular humour magazine Puck, and she was the only
female contributor during the magazine's existence. The large volume of work she produced for
the magazine into the early years of the 20th century was predominantly printed in full
colour, but it was the sophistication and expressiveness of her ink line work which
was the true foundation of her technique, and the reputation she quickly established
with it. Many of these illustrations were double page
spreads which explored the compositional challenges of densely populated crowd scenes, and her
facility for this was another significant factor in their success.
And although many of these scenes were simply lightly humorous and life affirming she was
also known to tackle harder edged material, where she dealt meaningfully with poverty,
racism and other societal ills of the period. In fact, quite a lot if her work for Puck
and other magazines featured black characters, and although they were intended to be humorous
they were obviously created without malice and were some considerable distance from the
more generic stereotyping to be found in the work of quite a few of her contemporaries.
In 1901 O'Neill divorced Gray Latham, but the disobliging man promptly died later that
year so she needn't have gone to the trouble. A year later she married again, this time
to Harry Leon Wilson, the assistant editor at Puck. In that year his first novel The
Spenders was published, featuring a series of dramatic line illustrations by O'Neill,
and soon after the marriage the couple relocated to Bonniebrook.
He had already given up his job to write novels full time, and from this point on her contributions
to Puck became less frequent. in 1903 the novel The Lions of the Lord, written
by Wilson and illustrated by O'Neill was also published. And In 1904, O'Neill published
her own first novel, The Loves of Edwy, which of course she also illustrated.
They collaborated again in the following year for Wilson's third book The Boss of Little
Arcady, which gave O'Neill the opportunity to create illustrations which were more lighthearted
than in their other collaborations. But despite her activity in books at the time
she maintained strong professional ties to several women's magazines and was a popular
choice to illustrate fiction in their pages. And her work continued to appear in Puck if
not at the same volume as it had previously. No details are given but she and Wilson divorced
after only 4 years together in 1907, and O'Neill never married again.
In 1909 she published another of her own books The Lady in the White Veil, and in the same
year she was also recruited to create a series of colour press ads for Jell-O, which ran
extensively in the same magazines she was illustrating fiction for.
It was also the year that the book A King in Khaki by Henry Kitchell Webster was published,
with a series of suitably melodramatic halftone monochromes by O'Neill, and she created even
more of a similar nature for another novel,The Crucible by Mark Lee Luther in the same year.
In fact 1909 could be argued to be the most significant year of her career because, despite
her already prodigious output, that was when her little characters, collectively known
as the Kewpies, made their debut in the pages of Ladies' Home Journal.
such was their immediate success with the female readership of the magazine that they
soon began to appear in rival publications, and drawing the characters quickly began to
dominate her output. Even so a year later another successful book
was published in the form of The Hickory Limb by Parker H Fillmore with some particularly
well observed and executed humorous line only spot illustrations by O'Neill.
But young mothers and their offspring couldn't get enough of the Kewpies, and in 1912 a deal
was struck with a German porcelain company to began manufacturing what were called Kewpie
dolls, but were more accurately figurines. It was also in 1912 that the book The Kewpies
and Dottie Darling, written and illustrated by O'Neill, was published across the USA and
the duotone spot illustrations of these terminally cute characters and their interaction with
human children consolidated their position as a household name.
This was followed by more Kewpie books between 1913 and 1916, all of which sold in large
numbers to a public with an apparently insatiable appetite for the concept.
When the USA entered the war in 1917 the German business connection predictably ended but
from this point onward dolls made of cheaper composite materials were mass produced in
the USA. O'Neill was an outspoken suffragette and she
used her own celebrity and even recruited the Kewpies as propaganda tools to help persuade
the legislature to give American women the vote.
The success of the Kewpies had by this point made her around 1.4 million dollars, which
is somewhere in the region of 20 million now. In addition to the family home at Bonniebrook
she bought other luxurious properties in New York City, Connecticut and a villa on the
Isle of Capri, Italy. It's also recorded that she began to live
a life of considerable opulence and spent her fortune extravagantly. Nor only had she
continued to support her entire family in some comfort, but was also prone to handing
over considerable amounts of money to various hangers-on in her growing parasitic entourage.
And although she didn't actually need to work any more O'Neill continued to illustrate and
even cultivated an interest in creating art. She relocated to Paris in 1921 where she studied
sculpture with Auguste Rodin and had several exhibitions of her work in both Paris and
New York. Her art bore no similarity to any of her illustration,
and focused on mythological fantasy. And in 1922 she published a collection of her own
poetry with a series of strange but compelling line illustrations titled The Master-Mistress
Book, and these verses and the frequently sinister drawings she illuminated them with
were very much her statement of intent to be taken seriously.
I can find no record of how well or otherwise this collection sold but I doubt that it would
have added greatly to her accumulated wealth. In 1926 she returned to the United States,
and the following year published The Kewpies and the Runaway Baby. But sales were nothing
like as great as her earlier books and it was the last book of its kind to be published.
The characters continued to feature in children's comics and sales of the dolls carried on,
if only at a much reduced volume, but it was by now obvious that the Kewpie phenomenon
was losing its grip on the public imagination. A year later she published the novel titled
Garda, and in 1930 another titled The Goblin Woman. The scarcity of images for both suggests
that they too were far from bestsellers. In 1930 she also published her children's
book collaboration with her younger brother George. This was Tomorrow's House or The Tiny
Angel, and for this children's fantasy O'Neill drew a series of uncharacteristically bold
gestural monochromes. But this too failed to have a significant
impact with the public.
The financial collapse of the Great Depression in the early 1930s dealt her some serious
financial blows, and combined with her own extravagance and generosity she was obliged
to sell her other properties and live at Bonniebrook in somewhat reduced circumstances.
In an attempt to revive her success she designed a new doll named Little Ho Ho, which was a
laughing baby Buddha. but before production began, the factory burned to the ground, and
so did her hopes of a revival in her fortunes. She continued to live a quiet and relatively
modest life in retirement at Bonniebrook , and following her death from heart failure in
1944 at the age of 69 she was buried there too.