Rose O'Neill's Biography

“Give me this child,” my father was saying. “I want to make an experiment. Specialize. She shall have no studies except those conducive to the Arts.”

“For pity’s sake,” said my mother. “Let the poor little creature get an ordinary education first.”

“She will have no occasion for an ordinary education.”

“But she can’t say two and two make four.”

“Why should she?” he asked. “I don’t expect her to be at such a loss for something to say.”


I was present. But I was not conspicuously present, being under a table drawing little fat frogs on lily-pads in the fly-leaves of a book. The frogs had a Kewpish look though it was a quarter of a century before I drew my first Kewpie.

- Rose O’Neill

Her Story

The story of Rose O’Neill reads like a fairy tale. Cecilia Rose O’Neill was born in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania in 1874 to William Patrick O’Neill and Alice Asenath O’Neill. Papa O’Neill had romantic ideas about country life, so he moved the family from their comfortable Victorian “Emerald Cottage” to a sod house on the Nebraska prairie in 1877. His idea was to lead the glamorous life of a farmer who had nothing to do but to read poetry and love. Instead, he journeyed to neighboring towns to sell books to people who did not feel the need for them. Rose’s mother “Meemie” had never cooked, mended, or planted. The O’Neill family was unsuited for pioneer living, just as much as the satin drapes, tapestries, and piles of books the children had to sit on in place of chairs. The O’Neill’s soon moved to the city of Omaha, where they eventually grew to a family of eight. Rose was the second born child and the eldest girl. She adored taking care of the younger children, and was devastated when her baby brother Edward died suddenly at the age of 2.

A Drawing of Rose O'Neill's Mother

Rose honed her natural abilities by copying pictures from the many volumes in her father’s library. At the age of 14, she entered a contest sponsored by the Omaha World Herald for the best drawing by a Nebraska school child. The title of her submission was a very sophisticated theme entitled “Temptation Leading Down into an Abyss” raising suspicions to its originality. She was asked to come to the editor’s office to demonstrate her skill. She won a five dollar gold piece, and by the early 1890’s Rose began selling her drawings to publications as far away as Denver and Chicago, thus launching a career as a full-fledged illustrator.

As legend tells, when Rose was 18, her mother sold the family cow to send her to New York to seek work as an illustrator. She stayed with the Sisters of St. Regis who accompanied her on her sales calls. Rose sold many illustrations to such periodicals as Colliers, Truth, Life, and Harpers. She signed her drawings C.R.O. to hide the fact that she was a woman. A year after she had moved to New York, Rose traveled to her family’s new home in the remote Missouri Ozarks. It took two days by wagon to get from Springfield to the O’Neill homestead. In her autobiography, Rose recalled, “The next day we went deeper and deeper into the thick woods. I forgot my fears and shouted with joy. I called it the “tangle” and my extravagant heart was tangled in it for good.” She named the O’Neill homestead Bonniebrook because of the little stream that ran along side the family’s cabin.

After a long stay, Rose returned to New York. She became the first female staff artist at Puck Magazine. In 1896 she married her sweetheart Gray Latham who had a habit of spending her money just as fast as she made it. There were times that Gray showed up on pay day to pick up Rose’s wages, leaving her without any money for car fare. This upset Rose a great deal, as she was the sole support of her large family back in Missouri and they depended on her. The tumultuous marriage lasted only five years, and the divorce left Rose devastated. She had been squirreling away money to send to her mother, so that her family could begin construction on a 14 room Ozark “mansion”.

Bonniebrook was where Rose went to mend her broken heart. She began receiving mysterious letters and packages from an “admirer” in New York, who turned out to be Harry Leon Wilson the literary editor at Puck Magazine. Always the romantic, Rose was smitten more with his letters than with Harry. They began their ill-fated marriage in 1902. Rose and Harry split their time between Bonniebrook, Cos Cob, Connecticut, Paris, and the Isle of Capri, off the coast of Italy. Harry and Rose were both busy writing the next few years. Rose published her first illustrated novel The Loves of Edwy in 1904. Harry was writing novels and Broadway plays with his partner Booth Tarkington. In 1906 Rose was elected to the Societe’ des Beaux Arts in Paris. This honor included the privilege of exhibiting in the society’s Paris salon where her paintings and drawings met with much enthusiasm. While wintering at Bonniebrook in 1905, tragedy struck the O’Neill family once again. Rose’s brother Jamie died suddenly of smallpox at the age of 24. During the five years that Rose and Harry were together, Harry was extremely sullen and moody and couldn’t bear Rose’s bubbly and exuberant personality. He particularly hated it when she talked to him in “baby talk” which she continued to do nonetheless. Rose’s marriage to Harry ended in 1907 although they remained amiable. She was done with marriage for good.

1909 marked the beginning of Rose’s life as a very wealthy woman. That year she created the Kewpies and they appeared in the Christmas issue of The Ladies Home Journal. They then appeared regularly in the Woman’s Home Companion and Good Housekeeping for the next 25 years. Kewpies became a phenomenon. A merchandising boom swept over the world in 1913 lasting for decades. Items from dolls to doorknockers were produced bearing the image of Rose’s Kewpies.

From this, Rose acquired a spacious and well appointed apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village, a 10 acre estate in Westport, Connecticut she named “Carabas Castle” after the marquis in “Puss in Boots” and her love of cats, and she also purchased a villa on Capri from her friend, American landscape painter Charles Caryl Coleman. Generous to a fault, Rose allowed Coleman, who could no longer afford the villa, to reside there until his death. Not only did Rose continue supporting her large family, she also held court at her many estates for fledgling artists. Guests would come for the weekend and stay on for years. She did not have the heart to throw them out. She was also too kind hearted to give another artist advice on his work. “I couldn’t tell him the truth,” she was quoted as saying of a talent less would be artist, “It’d be like stepping on a kitten.”

Rose continued to illustrate for magazines, advertisers, publishing houses, and her monthly Kewpie comic pages. She was a workaholic, working well into the night. She also continued to produce a large body of personal work which she described as the “Sweet Monsters”. Her mentor, French sculptor Auguste Rodin, had encouraged Rose to show the world these private drawings. In 1921 Rose had an entire exhibition of the monster drawings at the Galerie Devambez in Paris. The following year the exhibition was shown again to an American audience at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York. Both shows met with rave reviews.

All of the estates and people Rose was supporting began to drain her finances. By the 1930’s, the Kewpies were no longer generating the kind of income they once did. Magazines began using photographs, as illustration was out of vogue. Rose had a difficult time finding work, and was finally forced to sell off her many properties. Meemie’s failing health and her financial woes brought Rose back to Bonniebrook for good in 1936 the same year Papa O’Neill had died. Rose’s beloved mother Meemie followed in 1937. Never down-hearted, Rose spent her “retirement” writing her memoirs, speaking at local colleges, and trying unsuccessfully to replicate the success of the Kewpie with a laughing Buddha character she named “HoHo”. Although Rose died impoverished in April of 1944 at the age of 69, she had made nearly fifty-five hundred drawings, innumerable paintings both in oil and watercolor; she was a sculptor, suffragist, inventor, business woman, philosopher, poet, novelist, children’s book author, and even a musician. There is no mistaking that she lived an extraordinarily rich and productive life.

Rose O'Neill with Thomas Hart Benton

As a postscript, in a letter written by Paul O’Neill, Rose’s nephew, to Rowena Godding Ruggles, the author of The One Rose in 1956 he stated, “…Much of the absence of information on Rose and her work is due to the fire which consumed Bonniebrook after her death. I shudder to think of all that burned; fourteen rooms and an attic full to overflowing! The great loss was Rose’s writings and her valuable collection of rare, first-edition, autographed books; books in which she had made marginal notes. There were valuable antique furnishings, paintings, and many priceless art treasures. However, Rose had been persuaded, shortly before her death, to move a whole museum full of her possessions to School of the Ozarks (now College of the Ozarks), in Branson (Missouri). And I, by some chance, drove down to Bonniebrook just two days before the fire and brought back all her unframed drawings.”

 

Further Readings on Rose O'Neill

 

 

 

Rose O'Neill - The Girl Who Loved to Draw
by Linda Brewster
© 2009 Linda Brewster and published by Boxing Day Books

American Illustrator Rose O’Neill
by J. L. Wilkerson
© 2001 Acorn Books

The Story of Rose O’Neill – An Autobiography
Edited by Miriam Formanek-Brunell
© 1997 University of Missouri Press

Kewpies and Beyond – The World of Rose O’Neill
by Shelley Armitage
© 1994 University Press of Mississippi

The One Rose – Mother of the Immortal Kewpies
by Rowena Godding Ruggles
© 1964 Rowena Godding Ruggles

Titans and Kewpies – the Life and Art of Rose O’Neill
by Ralph Alan McCanse
© 1968 Vantage Press