A KEWPISH LIFE

By Florence Theriault

“She has the secret of infernal youth”, O’Henry wrote of Rose O’Neill. The same might be said of Kewpies, the eternally, infernally youthful creatures that made her famous. Although, in 1909, when Kewpies arrived in the pages of Ladies Home Journal, Rose O’Neill was already an established and respected artist and author in literary circles, it was the extraordinary Kewpie craze, lasting nearly three decades in its first rush, that brought her widespread fame and extraordinary wealth.

Imagine the direction that O’Neill’s art might have taken without the omnipresent Kewpies to distract and demand her time and attention. In 1905 while she and her then husband, Harry Wilson sojourned on the Isle of Capri, her work grabbed the attention of M. Dubufe, the French president of Societe des Beaux Arts. Dubufe arranged an exhibition of her work in Paris and she was elected a member of that prestigious artist’s society. O’Neill returned to Paris many times in the next twenty years, and, in fact, there is a close resemblance of many of her drawings during that time to other Parisian society illustrators such as Poulbot whom she surely knew.

Rose O’Neill would be the first to declare that Kewpies did not spring uniquely from her pen. In fact, in a January 1914 article in Woman’s Home Companion she gave credit to fellow artist and author Palmer Cox whose bug-eyed and humorous creatures, the Brownies, had partly inspired the Kewpie design. Her other inspirations were closer at hand. It is said that her brother Clink, eternally youthful and loving, inspired the nature of Kewpie, and that Doodledog was based upon the real puppy that came to live with her during her sojourn in Capri in the summer of 1905.

Rose O’Neill was a creature of fantasy, as much as her Kewpies, and she played to the role.

Friends described her as an Isadora Duncan of the pen, and she made famous the daily wearing of loose- fitting flowing robes that she referred to as her “aura”. Her letters, a voluminous correspondence, are peppered with extravagant romantic phrases and drawings. Her many homes, in Italy, at Washington Square in New York, at Carabas in Connecticut and certainly Bonniebrook, the family home in the Ozarks, had an open door policy that excluded no friend and she reveled in the resulting surprises of everyday life that this engendered. The 1920’s Paris soirees surely had a rival in the parlor gatherings at the O’Neill homes; friends would come to visit for a day, and remain for a year. She was dreamy, poetic, and ethereal, and it was a persona she cherished.

Yet she was also practical, and oh, she was a worker. Bemoaning the lack of time for her “serious art” O’Neill toiled incessantly to keep alive the spirit of her popular and profitable Kewpies. The correspondence of O’Neill with American poet Orrick Johns, illustrates her warring personalities, a generosity of spirit and its ensuing need for money at battle with the desire for poetic freedom.

Looking at her work today, O’Neill seems apolitical or, at least, international in spirit. Her important bisque Kewpies were, after all, produced in Germany during the period of WWI, and her only reference to that war was to speak of “those horrible British” who torpedoed a whole shipload of her first bisque Kewpies on their way through the English Channel. The myriad of Kewpie soldiers, created as part of her bisque line, were not soldiers in the traditional sense; their only duty was to fight dreariness and ill-will. The only social movement she overtly supported was woman’s suffrage about which she marched in protest for the vote, and wrote and illustrated many protest pieces.

Yet, lately, researchers have begun again to study her work with a notion that perhaps the Kewpie stories have a larger significance. They contain timeless and universal messages of good spirit, generosity and acceptance, peppered with a gentle sardonic view of humanity. Perhaps, it is thought, Kewpie was not just for kids, after all. x