page_title: Rose O'Neill
section_title: Move to New York
hierarchical_section_title: Rose O'Neill / Career / Move to New York
caption_attribution_description: English: Page 757, Scribner's Magazine 1908. Extract from scan of illus for the story "Phyllida" by Temple Bailey. Illus by Rose O'Neill Wilson
context_page_description: Rose Cecil O'Neill was an American cartoonist, illustrator, artist, and writer. 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.
  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.
context_section_description: 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.
caption: Page 757, Scribner's Magazine 1908. Extract from scan of illustration for the story "Phyllida" by Temple Bailey.
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