Rose O’Neill is known as one of the foremost artists and illustrators from the turn of the 20th century. She was also an author of four novels and a book of poetry, activist, inventor, and mother of the Kewpie, Scootles and Ho-Ho. Her many accomplishments made her a public icon.
Rose was born on June 25, 1874, in Wilkes Barre, PA, the second child of Patrick and Alice Asenath O’Neill. Rose’s personality was a blend of her father’s impractical nature and her mother’s common sense. She was already drawing while still a young child and was largely self-taught by studying illustrated art books. Early on, the O’Neills moved to the outskirts of Omaha, NE. After winning a drawing contest for children under the age of 14, Rose started receiving commissions from several Midwestern publications.
At 19, Rose moved to New York City with her illustrations. Magazine publishers found a fresh talent in her drawing style. She was hired as the first full-time woman artist on the staff of Puck, a well-known humor magazine.
Her numerous illustrations appeared in Twentieth Century Home, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Weekly, and Brooklyn Life. In 1896, she created a comic strip featured in Truth Magazine. This made her the first female published cartoonist.
Rose became world famous for creating the “Kewpies.” Their first appearance was in the December 1909 Ladies’ Home Journal magazine. They later were used in many other magazines and publications. Rose wrote and illustrated all the Kewpie stories, often using the Day Post Office (Day, MO) to send her drawings to publishers around the world. To meet children’s demands for a “hold-in-the-hand” doll, Rose designed and sculpted the Kewpie doll in 1912.
Her creation caught on like wildfire with the public resulting in a stampede of eager manufacturers trying to get exclusive licensing rights. Kewpies appeared on everything imaginable from baby blankets to Sunday comic pages and everything in between. She later created the very successful “Scootles” doll, and lastly at Bonniebrook, Ho-Ho, the Little Laughing Buddha.
In 1921 (Paris) and 1922 (New York), Rose staged exhibitions of her non-Kewpie artwork. She called these drawings her “Sweet Monsters.” They were images that flashed out of Rose’s subconscious, captured onto paper in web-like strokes of ink and pencil. The drawings often featured half-human, half-animal figures representing a long ago, personal Arcadian dream.
In 1898, she had constructed her heart’s true home. It was a rambling 14 room hand-built wooden structure located in the Missouri Ozark Hills north of Branson. She called it Bonniebrook. Rose frequently returned saying it was, “the place I always loved the best.” In 1937, Rose permanently moved back where she could frequently be seen in Branson, at the School of the Ozarks, and at Marvel Cave. At the School of the Ozarks, she gave presentations, played the piano, and loaned her art to the museum.
By the late 1930s, her illustration style was very dated and print media was transitioning from original art to photography. Eventually, all new sources of her income disappeared.
Ill health plagued Rose’s later years and she suffered a series of strokes in the early 1940s. She died at age 69 on April 6, 1944, at the home of her nephew in Springfield, MO, and was buried at Bonniebrook.
Bonniebrook itself burned to the ground in 1947. Fortunately, the majority of her precious artworks had been removed from the house just a few days prior to the fire. Bonniebrook and the gardens have been reconstructed as a remembrance of Rose’s earlier years.