Queer Places:
Bonniebrook Home & Museum, Walnut Shade, MO 65771
62 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012
Castle Carabas, Imperial Ave, Westport, CT 06880
Villa Narcissus, Via Madre Serafina, 31, 80073 Capri NA
ONeill Cemetery
Walnut Shade, Taney County, Missouri, USA
Rose Cecil O'Neill (June 25, 1874 – April 6, 1944) was an American
cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer. A fictional character in Vestal
Fire by Compton Mackenzie. She built a successful career
as a magazine and book illustrator and, at a young age, became the best-known
and highest- paid female commercial illustrator in the United States. O' Neill
earned a fortune and international fame by creating the
Kewpie, the
most widely known cartoon character until
Mickey Mouse.[1]
The daughter of a book salesman and a homemaker, O'Neill was raised in
rural
Nebraska. She exhibited interest in the arts at an early age, and sought a
career as an illustrator in New York City at age fifteen. Her Kewpie cartoons,
which made their debut in a 1909 issue of
Ladies' Home Journal, were later manufactured as
bisque
dolls in 1912 by J. D. Kestner, a German toy company, followed by
composition material and
celluloid
versions. The dolls were wildly popular in the early twentieth century, and
are considered to be one of the first mass-marketed toys in the United States.
O'Neill also wrote several novels and books of poetry, and was active in
the
women's suffrage movement. She was for a time the highest-paid female
illustrator in the world upon the success of the Kewpie dolls.[2]
Rose Cecil O'Neill was born on June 25, 1874, in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her parents were William Patrick Henry and
Alice Cecilia Asenath Senia Smith O'Neill "Meemie". She had two younger
sisters, Lee and Callista, and three younger brothers: Hugh, James, and
Clarence. Her father was a bookseller of Irish descent who loved literature,
art and theater. Her mother was a gifted musician, actress, and teacher.[3]
O'Neill revealed her talents and love for art and writing at a very young age.
At thirteen, she entered a children's drawing competition sponsored by the
Omaha Herald
and won first prize for her drawing, titled "Temptation Leading to an Abyss".
Within two years, O'Neill was providing illustrations for the local Omaha
publications Excelsior and The Great Divide as well as other
periodicals, having secured this work with help from the editor at the
Omaha World-Herald and the Art Director from Everybody Magazine who
had judged the competition. The income helped support her family, which her
father had struggled to support as a bookseller.
O'Neill attended the Sacred Heart Convent school in Omaha.
To help foster his daughter's talents, O'Neill's father brought her to New
York in 1893 to help begin her career; they stopped in Chicago en route to
visit the
World Columbian Exposition where she saw large paintings and sculptures
for the first time. She had only seen such work in her father's books. O'Neill
was then left to live with the Sisters of St. Regis, a
convent in
New York City.
The nuns accompanied her to various publishers to sell work from her portfolio
of sixty drawings. She was able to sell her drawings to numerous publishing
houses and began taking orders for more.
Illustrations by O'Neill were featured in a September 19, 1896, issue of
True magazine, making her the first published American woman cartoonist.
While O'Neill was living in New York, her father made a
homestead claim on a small tract of land in the
Ozarks
wilderness of southern
Missouri.
The tract had a
"dog-trot" cabin with two log cabins (one was used for eating and the
other for sleeping) and a
breezeway
between. A year later when O'Neill visited the land, it had become known as
"Bonniebrook".
During this time O'Neill was experiencing considerable success, having joined
the staff of
Puck, an American humor magazine, where she was the only female on
staff.
In 1909, she began work drawing advertisements for
Jell-O,
and contributed illustrations to
Harper's and
Life magazines.[14]
In 1892, while in Omaha, O'Neill met a young Virginian named Gray Latham,
whom she married in 1896. He visited O'Neill in New York City, and continued
writing to her when she went to Missouri to see her family. After Latham's
father went to
Mexico to make films, he went to Bonniebrook in 1896. Concerned with the
welfare of her family, O'Neill sent much of her paycheck home.
In the following years O'Neill became unhappy with Latham, as he liked
"living large" and gambling, and was known as a
playboy. O'Neill found that Latham, with his very expensive tastes, had
spent her paychecks on himself. O'Neill then moved to
Taney County, Missouri, where she filed for divorce in 1901, returning to
Bonniebrook. Latham died the same year, and some sources state that O'Neill
was widowed.[14]
In late 1901, O'Neill began receiving anonymous letters and gifts in the
mail.
She learned that they were sent by
Harry Leon Wilson, an assistant editor at Puck. O'Neill and Wilson
became romantically involved soon after, and married in 1902.
After a honeymoon in
Colorado,
they moved to Bonniebrook, where they lived for the next several winters.
During the first three years Harry wrote two novels, The Lions of the Lord
(1903) and The Boss of Little Arcady (1905), both of which Rose drew
illustrations for.[14]
One of Harry's later novels,
Ruggles of Red Gap, became popular and was made into several motion
pictures, including a
silent movie, a "talkie" starring
Charles Laughton, and then a remake called
Fancy Pants starring
Lucille Ball and
Bob Hope.
Harry and Rose divorced in 1907.[18]
In 1904, O'Neill published her first novel, The Loves of Edwy, which
she also illustrated.
A review published by Book News in 1905 considered O'Neill's
illustrations to "possess a rare breadth of sympathy with and understanding of
humanity".
As educational opportunities were made available in the 19th-century, women
artists became part of professional enterprises, and some founded their own
art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to
help overcome that stereotype women became, according to art historian Laura
Prieto, "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus
became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern, and freer "New
Woman", a movement which O'Neill was heavily involved in.
According to Prieto, artists "played crucial roles in representing the New
Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type
through their own lives".
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, about 88% of the subscribers
of 11,000 magazines and periodicals were women. As women entered the artist
community, publishers hired women to create illustrations that depicted the
world from a woman's perspective. Other successful illustrators were
Jennie Augusta Brownscombe,
Jessie Willcox Smith,
Elizabeth Shippen Green, and
Violet Oakley.
It was amid the New Woman and burgeoning suffragist movements that, in
1908, O'Neill began to concentrate on producing original artwork, and it was
during this period that she created the whimsical
Kewpie
characters for which she became known.
Their name, "Kewpie", derives from
Cupid, the
Roman god of love.[24]
According to O'Neill, she became obsessed with the idea of the cherubic
characters, to the point that she had dreams about them: "I thought about the
Kewpies so much that I had a dream about them where they were all doing
acrobatic pranks on the coverlet of my bed. One sat in my hand."
She described them as "a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach
people to be merry and kind at the same time".[2]
The Kewpie characters made their debut in
comic
strip form in 1909 in an issue of
Ladies' Home Journal.
Further publications of the Kewpie comics in
Woman's Home Companion and
Good Housekeeping helped the cartoon grow in popularity rapidly.
In 1912, J. D. Kestner, a German porcelain company, began the manufacturing
of Kewpie dolls, and that year, O'Neill traveled to their
Waltershausen plant to oversee the production of the figurines.[2]
Later versions of the dolls were produced in
composition and
celluloid,
and were one of the first mass-marketed toys in the United States.[28]
As O'Neill rose to fame, she garnered a public reputation as a
bohemian, and became an ardent
women's rights advocate.[2][29]
The success of the Kewpies amassed her a fortune of $1.4 million,
with which she purchased properties including Bonniebrook, an apartment in
Washington Square Park in
Greenwich Village, Castle Carabas in
Connecticut, and Villa Narcissus (bought from
Charles Caryl Coleman) on the
Isle of Capri,
Italy.
At the height of the Kewpie success, O'Neill was the highest-paid female
illustrator in the world.[2][31]
O'Neill was well known in New York City's artistic circles, and through her
association, she was the inspiration for the song "Rose
of Washington Square".
O'Neill continued working, even at her wealthiest. Perhaps driven to
express herself by the unfortunate circumstances in her life, along with the
needs of her family, she delved into different types of art. She learned
sculpture at the hand of
Auguste Rodin and had several exhibitions of sculptures and paintings in
Paris and the
United States.
These works were more experimental in nature, and largely influenced by dreams
and mythology.
O'Neill spent 1921 to 1926 living in Paris.
While there, she was elected to the
Société Coloniale des Artistes Français in 1921, and had exhibitions of
her sculptures at the Galerie Devambez in Paris and the
Wildenstein Galleries in New York in 1921 and 1922, respectively.[14]
In 1927, O'Neill returned to the United States, and by 1937 was living at
Bonniebrook permanently. By the 1940s, she had lost the majority of her money
and properties, partly through extravagant spending, as well as the cost of
fully supporting her family, her entourage of "artistic" hangers-on, and her
first husband.
The
Great Depression also hurt O'Neill's fortune. During that period, O'Neill
was dismayed to find that her work was no longer in demand. After thirty years
of popularity, the Kewpie character phenomenon had faded, and photography was
replacing illustration as a commercial vehicle. O'Neill experimented with
crafting a new doll, eventually creating Little Ho Ho, which was a laughing
baby
Buddha. However, before plans could be finalized for production of the new
little figure, the factory burned to the ground.
O'Neill became a prominent personality in the
Branson, Missouri, community, donating her time and pieces of artwork to
the
School of the Ozarks at
Point Lookout, Missouri, and remaining active in the local art community.[31]
On April 6, 1944, O'Neill died of
heart failure resulting from
paralysis
at the home of her nephew in
Springfield, Missouri.
She is interred in the family cemetery at
Bonniebrook Homestead, next to her mother and several family members.[34]:2–4
Bonniebrook Homestead was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places in 1997.[35]
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