Rose Cecil O’Neill

Rose Cecil O’Neill was born on June 25, 1874, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In 1878, when Rose was three, her family moved to Nebraska in a covered wagon, and eventually located to Omaha. In Omaha, O’Neill attended the Sacred Heart Academy and the Holy Family Parish schools. O’Neill was a self-taught artist, learning techniques from books. Her early efforts were recognized when at thirteen she entered and won an Omaha World Herald drawing contest. Her prize was a $5 gold piece, and her winning entry was titled Temptation Leading Down into an Abyss.

In 1893 O’Neill moved to New York City, with her portfolio of drawings, and enrolled in classes at the convent of the Sisters of St. Regis as she looked for jobs in publishing, where she could use her drawings skills. She found work illustrating covers for Up to Date Magazine, Truth Magazine, New York Life and Brooklyn Life. In 1896 she was hired as the first female illustrator for the humor magazine Puck. O’Neill produced more than 700 cartoons for Puck between 1896 and 1903.

O’Neill continued her work in illustration throughout her career, contributing to publications such as Cosmopolitan, Pictorial Review and Harper’s, as well as many others. In addition to magazine illustrations, O’Neill also created commercial illustrations advertising products such as Jell-O, Oxydol, Edison Phonographs, and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

While O’Neill was in New York City, her family relocated to a farmstead in Taney County, near Branson, Missouri. The family’s homestead, Bonniebrook, became a second home for O’Neill; from 1894-1944 she split her time between New York City and the Ozarks. In 1937, she retired to Bonniebrook to live there full time.

O’Neill is best known as the creator of the character of the Kewpie. Her Kewpies were first published in 1909 in Ladies' Home Journal as illustrations for O’Neill’s poetry. O’Neill’s Kewpie character was the focus of a comic strip published in The New York Journal throughout the 1930s. Kewpies became so widely popular that O’Neill designed paper dolls of the characters and licensed the rights for use on everything from clothing to cameras, shoes, and fine china. Children wrote to O’Neill asking for a Kewpie doll to hold, so she contracted with George Borgfeldt and Company to create a Kewpie doll. O’Neill sculpted the mold for the doll, and in 1913 the Kewpie doll was patented.

In addition to her commercial work, O’Neill published novels, The Loves of Edwy and The Lady in the White Veil, children’s books, and volumes of poetry that she illustrated. O’Neill also made fine art drawings and paintings, including a series of private work she referred to as Sweet Monsters. This series dealt with issues of her time including the women’s rights movement.

Rose O’Neill died in Springfield, Missouri, on April 6, 1944.