Middle name provided by FG user # 46537737.
Places of birth and death provided by FG user # 47306054.
Spouse # 2 provided by FG user # 47849893
_____________________________________________________
Suggested edit: According the Rose O'Neill museum website, her name was Cecilia Rose O'Neill
http://roseoneill.org/
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: There are also two biographies written about her =
American Illustrator: Rose O'Neill. By J. L. Wilkerson. 2001
Rose O'Neill - The Girl Who Loved to Draw by Linda Brewster. 2009.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893) .
_____
Suggested edit: Grey Latham, Rose O'Neill's first husband = https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45145380/grey-latham
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: Some of Rose's Kewpie collection can be viewed at the Ralph Foster Museum at the College of the Ozarks south of Branson, Mo = https://www.rfostermuseum.com/Visit
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
____________
Suggested edit: Several divorce cases were disposed of Thursday, among others that of Mrs. Rose O'Neill-Latham vs. Gray Latham. Mrs. Latham was granted a divorce, the defendant failing to appear.
Source: Taney County Republican, Forsyth, MO. 25 Apr 1901, Image 5. Chronicling America Newspapers.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
_________________
Suggested edit: this paper mentions Rose O'Neill's sister coming to visit her = https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90061308/1909-12-03/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1789&index=13&rows=20&words=Neill+O+O%27Neill+Rose&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=Missouri&date2=1963&proxtext=Rose+O%27Neill&y=9&x=8&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
Contributor: FG user # (47849893
______________
Suggested edit: I finished her biography for her blog - http://the-history-nut-of-missouri.blogspot.com/2020/02/rose-oneill.html
Contributor: FG user # (47849893.
_______________________
Father link provided by FG user # 47830669.
Corrections on first and middle name provided by FG user # 47481674.∼Missouri Death Certificate: #14710
Name: Rose O'Neill
Sex: Female
Race: White
Usual Occupation: Artist + writer
Marital Status: Single
Death Age: 69 years, 9 months, 11 days.
Birth Date: June 25, 1874
Birth Place: Wilkes-Barrie, Penn.
Death Date: April 6, 1944, at 3:00 a.m.
Death Place: Springfield, Green County, Missouri
Cause of Death: Heart failure; Paralysis: Endocarditis, which affected Mitral valve in malignant form.
Father: William Patrick O'Neill (b. Unk.)
Mother: Aseneth Cecilia Smith (b. Wilkes-Barre, Penn)
Informant: Sister of Deceased, Callista O'Neill.
Burial: Bonnie Brook, Mo.
._______
ROSE O'NEILL INFUSED HER KEWPIES
WITH SPIRIT OF A RARE PERSONALITY.
Little Elves Which Charmed the World Represented but One Side of a Versatile Woman Who Rounded Out International Career as Artist and Writer With a Rich Adventure in Living in Her Taney County, Missouri Retreat.
At 3 o'clock yesterday morning Rose O'Neill died at the age of 69 at the home of a nephew in Springfield, Mo. In the afternoon some of her relatives and neighbors gathered at Bonniebrook, where she was buried beside her mother and a brother, "with only the simple woods as witness."
By Louis Mecker.
THE sensation of Rose O'Neill's career was the Kewpie dolls out of which she earned a fortune while still a young woman. It was at Bonniebrook, her secluded Taney County, Missouri, home that she dreamed the little elves into existence.
From an early age she had been illustrating stories for the national magazines and got in the habit of making head and tail pieces with cupids in them regular cupids. They were very slim compared with the soft, rounded Kewpies that came later. One day Edward Bok, editor of Ladies Home Journal, cut out a lot of those cupids, sent them to Miss O'Neill and asked if she could make a serial story of them. He offered to have the stories put into verse for her, but she told him she would do that little chore herself.
With their top-knot, wide smile and sidelong eyes, Kewpies first appeared in drawings and verses in 1909. Miss O'Neill indicated their origin In a couplet:
They're Kewpies, short for cupids: thus
They're shorter than that famous cuss.
They were bursting with kindness, their creator explained, because "their hearts were as well rounded as their tummies."
In the Ladies' Home Journal the drawings and verses followed each other month after month and later in Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion and the Delineator. The Kewpie philosophy grew and spread; it was all in the Kewpie smile. Children began writing to Miss O'Neill, asking if she couldn't make them a Kewpie they could hold in their hands.
"Just for fun," she said, "I molded a little statue of a Kewpie. Then the doll factories got the idea. I selected a factory, and the thing was done."
with a $2000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss There at Bonniebrook where father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one Wilson wrote and she Illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and Lions of the Lord"
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri It was there Wilson and Tarklngton wrote their hit play Man From Home" After their return to America Miss separated from Wilson
With Kewple gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri She purchased Carabas a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport Conn and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with
The Dolls Travel Far.
By 1913 the dolls were all over the world. The first ones were made of bisque In Germany. Miss O'Neill went there and molded nine statues of different sizes. She took pains to see each model came out a perfect Kewpie and took particular pains with the smallest because as she said that would be the one for the poor children. Before the first World war began, about thirty factories were making them as fast as they could pull them out of the ovens. Later they were made of various materials in the United States. A volume of cheap models were manufactured in Japan. Miss O'Neill's latest contract, for manufacture of Kewie and Scooties dolls, was signed March 1, 1944, with the Cameo Doll company of New York.
Two other doll creations followed the Kewpie. Scooties, the baby tourist, is playmate of the Kewpies in the Kewpie stories. Scooties is a human baby, not an elf, but she has an elfin smile of her own; funny, clumsy baby legs, and hands in infantile positions never seen on any doll before. Then there is Ho-Ho, created In 1940, a sort of baby Buddha, sitting with a sympathetic laugh spread over his face, infecting with cheer all who look at him. "His philosophy," said Miss O'Neill, goes farther even than the Kewpie smile. I believe the wisdom of the ages is expressed by laughter."
A poet friend once said to Miss O'Neill that no one could make a Kewpie who couldn't make a good sonnet. And he was right, because Miss O'Neill wrote sonnets as well as well as other poetry--and novels and short stories.
Poetry and Music.
"Oh, I monkey with so many things." she once exclaimed. "I can't even keep my hands off pianos." Several of her poems she set to music and used to delight her friends, particularly with "When I Was Young and Dear," which she would sing with a sounding emphasis:
And few there are who live alas,
And they are far from here,
Who know how young and dear I was
When I was young and dear.
"I never know how anything comes to me." she said "There doesn't seem to be any Intelligence In it. Especially with a poem. I never can remember how it arrived. Of course in making a finished drawing, it lasts long enough for me to notice that there's something going on. And the business of making a sculpture is such an endless job that the agony tells me I am certainly up to something.
The dolls might be said to belong to the celestial section of Miss O'Neill's sculptural art. There is another department which she called the monster section. Visitors to Bonniebrook, the many-gabled green house wedged between brook and hillside deep in the arms of two cedar-plumed hills, see examples of this section. On the sloping lawn is a statue of a "woman faun," reclining In the grass. A symbol of developing life, she has hoofs, goat's legs, a woman's torso and no face--just a lifted mass that could be sculptured into features. The face is waiting for its soul, the final climb from the beast.
Another statue, ten feet high, is called "The Embrace of the Tree," symbolizing the passion for Nature herself. A monstrous nude man is almost crouched with the intensity of his clasp. The trunk of the tree in his arms has roughly the shape of a woman, without a head The man's head Is buried among the branches.
Art Exhibited In Paris.
Included In this section of her art are her "monster drawings" those strange, gigantic creatures embodying what she called "the epic of evolution." In 1922 Miss O'Neill exhibited in the Paris salon a collection of these drawings portraying primitive emotions of the race. Fauns, satyrs, centaurs and other mythical creatures were presented to symbolize the union of the animal and the divine. As a result she was elected an associate ot the Societe des Beaux Arts.
Recently Miss O'Neill completed the manuscript of her autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinarily gifted whimsical and charming personality. Born June 25 1874 at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., she was christened Rose Cecil. Her parents were William Patrick O'Neill, a bookseller and Alice Asenath Cecelia Smith O'Neill.
Her father had a romantic Irish nature with a never-stilled impulsion for seeking new horizons, and by the time Rose was of school age the family, which eventually included five other children, was living at Omaha, Neb. There she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart. By 15 she had become a self-taught illustrator and putting aside her original intention of becoming an actress, she went to New York for further study, entering the Convent of the Sisters of St. Regis on Riverside drive.
At 19 she married Gray Latham a young Virginian living in New York City. After a few years they separated. In connection with her work as an illustrator she became acquainted with the editor of Puck, Harry Leon Wilson. In 1902 Wilson resigned his position and with a $2,000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss O'Neill. There at Bonniebrook, where Rose's father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one, Wilson wrote and she illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and "The Lions of the Lord."
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton, they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri. It was there Wilson and Tarkington wrote their hit play, "The Man From Home." After their return to America, Miss O'Neill separated from Wilson.
With Kewpie gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri. She purchased Carabas, a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport, Conn., and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with that rare charm which lay in her imputing importance to everyone she met and in regarding every literary and artistic acquaintance as a potential genius. Usually attired In a wine-colored flowing velvet robe, dark honey colored hair curled on her shoulders like a medieval page, she sat for hours with her guests reading Francis Thompson aloud, listening to Bach recordings and smoking cigarettes.
Miss O'Neill's alter ego and constant companion, except for a few intervals of marriage and foreign travel, was her sunny unselfish sister Kallista, nine years her junior. Kallista figures in some of the most feeling poems of her 227-page volume of collected verse, "The Master-Mistress."
Years before the end of her life Miss O'Neill's Irish openhandedness had let her Kewpie fortune slip away. The Villa Narcissus was last in the confusion of the second World war and Carabas was liquidated. Even Bonniebrook saw lean days but there true lover of nature that she was, Miss O'Neill to the last defended against tiller and lumber-man every acre of bird-nesting bush and every crest of green shadowing cedar.
The strictest critics' estimates were that Miss O'Neill's as a poet had undeniable if erratic gifts. They acclaimed her charming humor as an illustrator. To her later novels, the allegorical "Garda" and the unconventional "Goblin Woman" they ascribed "excessive Celticism."
The list of Rose O'Neil's principal books includes the following: "The Loves of Edwy," 1904; "The Lady in the White Veil," 1909; "Kewpies and Dottie Darling," 1913; "Kewpies: Their Book, Verse and Poetry," 1913; "Kewpie Kutouts," 1914; "The Master-Mistress," 1922; "Kewpies and the Runaway Baby," 1928; "Garda," 1929; "The Goblin Woman," 1930.
The Kansas City Times
Kansas City, Missouri
Friday, April 7, 1944, p. 18
.
Places of birth and death provided by FG user # 47306054.
Spouse # 2 provided by FG user # 47849893
_____________________________________________________
Suggested edit: According the Rose O'Neill museum website, her name was Cecilia Rose O'Neill
http://roseoneill.org/
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: There are also two biographies written about her =
American Illustrator: Rose O'Neill. By J. L. Wilkerson. 2001
Rose O'Neill - The Girl Who Loved to Draw by Linda Brewster. 2009.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893) .
_____
Suggested edit: Grey Latham, Rose O'Neill's first husband = https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45145380/grey-latham
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: Some of Rose's Kewpie collection can be viewed at the Ralph Foster Museum at the College of the Ozarks south of Branson, Mo = https://www.rfostermuseum.com/Visit
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
____________
Suggested edit: Several divorce cases were disposed of Thursday, among others that of Mrs. Rose O'Neill-Latham vs. Gray Latham. Mrs. Latham was granted a divorce, the defendant failing to appear.
Source: Taney County Republican, Forsyth, MO. 25 Apr 1901, Image 5. Chronicling America Newspapers.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
_________________
Suggested edit: this paper mentions Rose O'Neill's sister coming to visit her = https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90061308/1909-12-03/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1789&index=13&rows=20&words=Neill+O+O%27Neill+Rose&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=Missouri&date2=1963&proxtext=Rose+O%27Neill&y=9&x=8&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
Contributor: FG user # (47849893
______________
Suggested edit: I finished her biography for her blog - http://the-history-nut-of-missouri.blogspot.com/2020/02/rose-oneill.html
Contributor: FG user # (47849893.
_______________________
Father link provided by FG user # 47830669.
Corrections on first and middle name provided by FG user # 47481674.∼Missouri Death Certificate: #14710
Name: Rose O'Neill
Sex: Female
Race: White
Usual Occupation: Artist + writer
Marital Status: Single
Death Age: 69 years, 9 months, 11 days.
Birth Date: June 25, 1874
Birth Place: Wilkes-Barrie, Penn.
Death Date: April 6, 1944, at 3:00 a.m.
Death Place: Springfield, Green County, Missouri
Cause of Death: Heart failure; Paralysis: Endocarditis, which affected Mitral valve in malignant form.
Father: William Patrick O'Neill (b. Unk.)
Mother: Aseneth Cecilia Smith (b. Wilkes-Barre, Penn)
Informant: Sister of Deceased, Callista O'Neill.
Burial: Bonnie Brook, Mo.
._______
ROSE O'NEILL INFUSED HER KEWPIES
WITH SPIRIT OF A RARE PERSONALITY.
Little Elves Which Charmed the World Represented but One Side of a Versatile Woman Who Rounded Out International Career as Artist and Writer With a Rich Adventure in Living in Her Taney County, Missouri Retreat.
At 3 o'clock yesterday morning Rose O'Neill died at the age of 69 at the home of a nephew in Springfield, Mo. In the afternoon some of her relatives and neighbors gathered at Bonniebrook, where she was buried beside her mother and a brother, "with only the simple woods as witness."
By Louis Mecker.
THE sensation of Rose O'Neill's career was the Kewpie dolls out of which she earned a fortune while still a young woman. It was at Bonniebrook, her secluded Taney County, Missouri, home that she dreamed the little elves into existence.
From an early age she had been illustrating stories for the national magazines and got in the habit of making head and tail pieces with cupids in them regular cupids. They were very slim compared with the soft, rounded Kewpies that came later. One day Edward Bok, editor of Ladies Home Journal, cut out a lot of those cupids, sent them to Miss O'Neill and asked if she could make a serial story of them. He offered to have the stories put into verse for her, but she told him she would do that little chore herself.
With their top-knot, wide smile and sidelong eyes, Kewpies first appeared in drawings and verses in 1909. Miss O'Neill indicated their origin In a couplet:
They're Kewpies, short for cupids: thus
They're shorter than that famous cuss.
They were bursting with kindness, their creator explained, because "their hearts were as well rounded as their tummies."
In the Ladies' Home Journal the drawings and verses followed each other month after month and later in Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion and the Delineator. The Kewpie philosophy grew and spread; it was all in the Kewpie smile. Children began writing to Miss O'Neill, asking if she couldn't make them a Kewpie they could hold in their hands.
"Just for fun," she said, "I molded a little statue of a Kewpie. Then the doll factories got the idea. I selected a factory, and the thing was done."
with a $2000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss There at Bonniebrook where father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one Wilson wrote and she Illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and Lions of the Lord"
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri It was there Wilson and Tarklngton wrote their hit play Man From Home" After their return to America Miss separated from Wilson
With Kewple gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri She purchased Carabas a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport Conn and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with
The Dolls Travel Far.
By 1913 the dolls were all over the world. The first ones were made of bisque In Germany. Miss O'Neill went there and molded nine statues of different sizes. She took pains to see each model came out a perfect Kewpie and took particular pains with the smallest because as she said that would be the one for the poor children. Before the first World war began, about thirty factories were making them as fast as they could pull them out of the ovens. Later they were made of various materials in the United States. A volume of cheap models were manufactured in Japan. Miss O'Neill's latest contract, for manufacture of Kewie and Scooties dolls, was signed March 1, 1944, with the Cameo Doll company of New York.
Two other doll creations followed the Kewpie. Scooties, the baby tourist, is playmate of the Kewpies in the Kewpie stories. Scooties is a human baby, not an elf, but she has an elfin smile of her own; funny, clumsy baby legs, and hands in infantile positions never seen on any doll before. Then there is Ho-Ho, created In 1940, a sort of baby Buddha, sitting with a sympathetic laugh spread over his face, infecting with cheer all who look at him. "His philosophy," said Miss O'Neill, goes farther even than the Kewpie smile. I believe the wisdom of the ages is expressed by laughter."
A poet friend once said to Miss O'Neill that no one could make a Kewpie who couldn't make a good sonnet. And he was right, because Miss O'Neill wrote sonnets as well as well as other poetry--and novels and short stories.
Poetry and Music.
"Oh, I monkey with so many things." she once exclaimed. "I can't even keep my hands off pianos." Several of her poems she set to music and used to delight her friends, particularly with "When I Was Young and Dear," which she would sing with a sounding emphasis:
And few there are who live alas,
And they are far from here,
Who know how young and dear I was
When I was young and dear.
"I never know how anything comes to me." she said "There doesn't seem to be any Intelligence In it. Especially with a poem. I never can remember how it arrived. Of course in making a finished drawing, it lasts long enough for me to notice that there's something going on. And the business of making a sculpture is such an endless job that the agony tells me I am certainly up to something.
The dolls might be said to belong to the celestial section of Miss O'Neill's sculptural art. There is another department which she called the monster section. Visitors to Bonniebrook, the many-gabled green house wedged between brook and hillside deep in the arms of two cedar-plumed hills, see examples of this section. On the sloping lawn is a statue of a "woman faun," reclining In the grass. A symbol of developing life, she has hoofs, goat's legs, a woman's torso and no face--just a lifted mass that could be sculptured into features. The face is waiting for its soul, the final climb from the beast.
Another statue, ten feet high, is called "The Embrace of the Tree," symbolizing the passion for Nature herself. A monstrous nude man is almost crouched with the intensity of his clasp. The trunk of the tree in his arms has roughly the shape of a woman, without a head The man's head Is buried among the branches.
Art Exhibited In Paris.
Included In this section of her art are her "monster drawings" those strange, gigantic creatures embodying what she called "the epic of evolution." In 1922 Miss O'Neill exhibited in the Paris salon a collection of these drawings portraying primitive emotions of the race. Fauns, satyrs, centaurs and other mythical creatures were presented to symbolize the union of the animal and the divine. As a result she was elected an associate ot the Societe des Beaux Arts.
Recently Miss O'Neill completed the manuscript of her autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinarily gifted whimsical and charming personality. Born June 25 1874 at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., she was christened Rose Cecil. Her parents were William Patrick O'Neill, a bookseller and Alice Asenath Cecelia Smith O'Neill.
Her father had a romantic Irish nature with a never-stilled impulsion for seeking new horizons, and by the time Rose was of school age the family, which eventually included five other children, was living at Omaha, Neb. There she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart. By 15 she had become a self-taught illustrator and putting aside her original intention of becoming an actress, she went to New York for further study, entering the Convent of the Sisters of St. Regis on Riverside drive.
At 19 she married Gray Latham a young Virginian living in New York City. After a few years they separated. In connection with her work as an illustrator she became acquainted with the editor of Puck, Harry Leon Wilson. In 1902 Wilson resigned his position and with a $2,000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss O'Neill. There at Bonniebrook, where Rose's father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one, Wilson wrote and she illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and "The Lions of the Lord."
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton, they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri. It was there Wilson and Tarkington wrote their hit play, "The Man From Home." After their return to America, Miss O'Neill separated from Wilson.
With Kewpie gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri. She purchased Carabas, a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport, Conn., and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with that rare charm which lay in her imputing importance to everyone she met and in regarding every literary and artistic acquaintance as a potential genius. Usually attired In a wine-colored flowing velvet robe, dark honey colored hair curled on her shoulders like a medieval page, she sat for hours with her guests reading Francis Thompson aloud, listening to Bach recordings and smoking cigarettes.
Miss O'Neill's alter ego and constant companion, except for a few intervals of marriage and foreign travel, was her sunny unselfish sister Kallista, nine years her junior. Kallista figures in some of the most feeling poems of her 227-page volume of collected verse, "The Master-Mistress."
Years before the end of her life Miss O'Neill's Irish openhandedness had let her Kewpie fortune slip away. The Villa Narcissus was last in the confusion of the second World war and Carabas was liquidated. Even Bonniebrook saw lean days but there true lover of nature that she was, Miss O'Neill to the last defended against tiller and lumber-man every acre of bird-nesting bush and every crest of green shadowing cedar.
The strictest critics' estimates were that Miss O'Neill's as a poet had undeniable if erratic gifts. They acclaimed her charming humor as an illustrator. To her later novels, the allegorical "Garda" and the unconventional "Goblin Woman" they ascribed "excessive Celticism."
The list of Rose O'Neil's principal books includes the following: "The Loves of Edwy," 1904; "The Lady in the White Veil," 1909; "Kewpies and Dottie Darling," 1913; "Kewpies: Their Book, Verse and Poetry," 1913; "Kewpie Kutouts," 1914; "The Master-Mistress," 1922; "Kewpies and the Runaway Baby," 1928; "Garda," 1929; "The Goblin Woman," 1930.
The Kansas City Times
Kansas City, Missouri
Friday, April 7, 1944, p. 18
.
Middle name provided by FG user # 46537737.
Places of birth and death provided by FG user # 47306054.
Spouse # 2 provided by FG user # 47849893
_____________________________________________________
Suggested edit: According the Rose O'Neill museum website, her name was Cecilia Rose O'Neill
http://roseoneill.org/
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: There are also two biographies written about her =
American Illustrator: Rose O'Neill. By J. L. Wilkerson. 2001
Rose O'Neill - The Girl Who Loved to Draw by Linda Brewster. 2009.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893) .
_____
Suggested edit: Grey Latham, Rose O'Neill's first husband = https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45145380/grey-latham
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: Some of Rose's Kewpie collection can be viewed at the Ralph Foster Museum at the College of the Ozarks south of Branson, Mo = https://www.rfostermuseum.com/Visit
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
____________
Suggested edit: Several divorce cases were disposed of Thursday, among others that of Mrs. Rose O'Neill-Latham vs. Gray Latham. Mrs. Latham was granted a divorce, the defendant failing to appear.
Source: Taney County Republican, Forsyth, MO. 25 Apr 1901, Image 5. Chronicling America Newspapers.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
_________________
Suggested edit: this paper mentions Rose O'Neill's sister coming to visit her = https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90061308/1909-12-03/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1789&index=13&rows=20&words=Neill+O+O%27Neill+Rose&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=Missouri&date2=1963&proxtext=Rose+O%27Neill&y=9&x=8&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
Contributor: FG user # (47849893
______________
Suggested edit: I finished her biography for her blog - http://the-history-nut-of-missouri.blogspot.com/2020/02/rose-oneill.html
Contributor: FG user # (47849893.
_______________________
Father link provided by FG user # 47830669.
Corrections on first and middle name provided by FG user # 47481674.∼Missouri Death Certificate: #14710
Name: Rose O'Neill
Sex: Female
Race: White
Usual Occupation: Artist + writer
Marital Status: Single
Death Age: 69 years, 9 months, 11 days.
Birth Date: June 25, 1874
Birth Place: Wilkes-Barrie, Penn.
Death Date: April 6, 1944, at 3:00 a.m.
Death Place: Springfield, Green County, Missouri
Cause of Death: Heart failure; Paralysis: Endocarditis, which affected Mitral valve in malignant form.
Father: William Patrick O'Neill (b. Unk.)
Mother: Aseneth Cecilia Smith (b. Wilkes-Barre, Penn)
Informant: Sister of Deceased, Callista O'Neill.
Burial: Bonnie Brook, Mo.
._______
ROSE O'NEILL INFUSED HER KEWPIES
WITH SPIRIT OF A RARE PERSONALITY.
Little Elves Which Charmed the World Represented but One Side of a Versatile Woman Who Rounded Out International Career as Artist and Writer With a Rich Adventure in Living in Her Taney County, Missouri Retreat.
At 3 o'clock yesterday morning Rose O'Neill died at the age of 69 at the home of a nephew in Springfield, Mo. In the afternoon some of her relatives and neighbors gathered at Bonniebrook, where she was buried beside her mother and a brother, "with only the simple woods as witness."
By Louis Mecker.
THE sensation of Rose O'Neill's career was the Kewpie dolls out of which she earned a fortune while still a young woman. It was at Bonniebrook, her secluded Taney County, Missouri, home that she dreamed the little elves into existence.
From an early age she had been illustrating stories for the national magazines and got in the habit of making head and tail pieces with cupids in them regular cupids. They were very slim compared with the soft, rounded Kewpies that came later. One day Edward Bok, editor of Ladies Home Journal, cut out a lot of those cupids, sent them to Miss O'Neill and asked if she could make a serial story of them. He offered to have the stories put into verse for her, but she told him she would do that little chore herself.
With their top-knot, wide smile and sidelong eyes, Kewpies first appeared in drawings and verses in 1909. Miss O'Neill indicated their origin In a couplet:
They're Kewpies, short for cupids: thus
They're shorter than that famous cuss.
They were bursting with kindness, their creator explained, because "their hearts were as well rounded as their tummies."
In the Ladies' Home Journal the drawings and verses followed each other month after month and later in Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion and the Delineator. The Kewpie philosophy grew and spread; it was all in the Kewpie smile. Children began writing to Miss O'Neill, asking if she couldn't make them a Kewpie they could hold in their hands.
"Just for fun," she said, "I molded a little statue of a Kewpie. Then the doll factories got the idea. I selected a factory, and the thing was done."
with a $2000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss There at Bonniebrook where father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one Wilson wrote and she Illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and Lions of the Lord"
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri It was there Wilson and Tarklngton wrote their hit play Man From Home" After their return to America Miss separated from Wilson
With Kewple gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri She purchased Carabas a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport Conn and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with
The Dolls Travel Far.
By 1913 the dolls were all over the world. The first ones were made of bisque In Germany. Miss O'Neill went there and molded nine statues of different sizes. She took pains to see each model came out a perfect Kewpie and took particular pains with the smallest because as she said that would be the one for the poor children. Before the first World war began, about thirty factories were making them as fast as they could pull them out of the ovens. Later they were made of various materials in the United States. A volume of cheap models were manufactured in Japan. Miss O'Neill's latest contract, for manufacture of Kewie and Scooties dolls, was signed March 1, 1944, with the Cameo Doll company of New York.
Two other doll creations followed the Kewpie. Scooties, the baby tourist, is playmate of the Kewpies in the Kewpie stories. Scooties is a human baby, not an elf, but she has an elfin smile of her own; funny, clumsy baby legs, and hands in infantile positions never seen on any doll before. Then there is Ho-Ho, created In 1940, a sort of baby Buddha, sitting with a sympathetic laugh spread over his face, infecting with cheer all who look at him. "His philosophy," said Miss O'Neill, goes farther even than the Kewpie smile. I believe the wisdom of the ages is expressed by laughter."
A poet friend once said to Miss O'Neill that no one could make a Kewpie who couldn't make a good sonnet. And he was right, because Miss O'Neill wrote sonnets as well as well as other poetry--and novels and short stories.
Poetry and Music.
"Oh, I monkey with so many things." she once exclaimed. "I can't even keep my hands off pianos." Several of her poems she set to music and used to delight her friends, particularly with "When I Was Young and Dear," which she would sing with a sounding emphasis:
And few there are who live alas,
And they are far from here,
Who know how young and dear I was
When I was young and dear.
"I never know how anything comes to me." she said "There doesn't seem to be any Intelligence In it. Especially with a poem. I never can remember how it arrived. Of course in making a finished drawing, it lasts long enough for me to notice that there's something going on. And the business of making a sculpture is such an endless job that the agony tells me I am certainly up to something.
The dolls might be said to belong to the celestial section of Miss O'Neill's sculptural art. There is another department which she called the monster section. Visitors to Bonniebrook, the many-gabled green house wedged between brook and hillside deep in the arms of two cedar-plumed hills, see examples of this section. On the sloping lawn is a statue of a "woman faun," reclining In the grass. A symbol of developing life, she has hoofs, goat's legs, a woman's torso and no face--just a lifted mass that could be sculptured into features. The face is waiting for its soul, the final climb from the beast.
Another statue, ten feet high, is called "The Embrace of the Tree," symbolizing the passion for Nature herself. A monstrous nude man is almost crouched with the intensity of his clasp. The trunk of the tree in his arms has roughly the shape of a woman, without a head The man's head Is buried among the branches.
Art Exhibited In Paris.
Included In this section of her art are her "monster drawings" those strange, gigantic creatures embodying what she called "the epic of evolution." In 1922 Miss O'Neill exhibited in the Paris salon a collection of these drawings portraying primitive emotions of the race. Fauns, satyrs, centaurs and other mythical creatures were presented to symbolize the union of the animal and the divine. As a result she was elected an associate ot the Societe des Beaux Arts.
Recently Miss O'Neill completed the manuscript of her autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinarily gifted whimsical and charming personality. Born June 25 1874 at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., she was christened Rose Cecil. Her parents were William Patrick O'Neill, a bookseller and Alice Asenath Cecelia Smith O'Neill.
Her father had a romantic Irish nature with a never-stilled impulsion for seeking new horizons, and by the time Rose was of school age the family, which eventually included five other children, was living at Omaha, Neb. There she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart. By 15 she had become a self-taught illustrator and putting aside her original intention of becoming an actress, she went to New York for further study, entering the Convent of the Sisters of St. Regis on Riverside drive.
At 19 she married Gray Latham a young Virginian living in New York City. After a few years they separated. In connection with her work as an illustrator she became acquainted with the editor of Puck, Harry Leon Wilson. In 1902 Wilson resigned his position and with a $2,000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss O'Neill. There at Bonniebrook, where Rose's father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one, Wilson wrote and she illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and "The Lions of the Lord."
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton, they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri. It was there Wilson and Tarkington wrote their hit play, "The Man From Home." After their return to America, Miss O'Neill separated from Wilson.
With Kewpie gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri. She purchased Carabas, a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport, Conn., and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with that rare charm which lay in her imputing importance to everyone she met and in regarding every literary and artistic acquaintance as a potential genius. Usually attired In a wine-colored flowing velvet robe, dark honey colored hair curled on her shoulders like a medieval page, she sat for hours with her guests reading Francis Thompson aloud, listening to Bach recordings and smoking cigarettes.
Miss O'Neill's alter ego and constant companion, except for a few intervals of marriage and foreign travel, was her sunny unselfish sister Kallista, nine years her junior. Kallista figures in some of the most feeling poems of her 227-page volume of collected verse, "The Master-Mistress."
Years before the end of her life Miss O'Neill's Irish openhandedness had let her Kewpie fortune slip away. The Villa Narcissus was last in the confusion of the second World war and Carabas was liquidated. Even Bonniebrook saw lean days but there true lover of nature that she was, Miss O'Neill to the last defended against tiller and lumber-man every acre of bird-nesting bush and every crest of green shadowing cedar.
The strictest critics' estimates were that Miss O'Neill's as a poet had undeniable if erratic gifts. They acclaimed her charming humor as an illustrator. To her later novels, the allegorical "Garda" and the unconventional "Goblin Woman" they ascribed "excessive Celticism."
The list of Rose O'Neil's principal books includes the following: "The Loves of Edwy," 1904; "The Lady in the White Veil," 1909; "Kewpies and Dottie Darling," 1913; "Kewpies: Their Book, Verse and Poetry," 1913; "Kewpie Kutouts," 1914; "The Master-Mistress," 1922; "Kewpies and the Runaway Baby," 1928; "Garda," 1929; "The Goblin Woman," 1930.
The Kansas City Times
Kansas City, Missouri
Friday, April 7, 1944, p. 18
.
Places of birth and death provided by FG user # 47306054.
Spouse # 2 provided by FG user # 47849893
_____________________________________________________
Suggested edit: According the Rose O'Neill museum website, her name was Cecilia Rose O'Neill
http://roseoneill.org/
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: There are also two biographies written about her =
American Illustrator: Rose O'Neill. By J. L. Wilkerson. 2001
Rose O'Neill - The Girl Who Loved to Draw by Linda Brewster. 2009.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893) .
_____
Suggested edit: Grey Latham, Rose O'Neill's first husband = https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/45145380/grey-latham
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
________
Suggested edit: Some of Rose's Kewpie collection can be viewed at the Ralph Foster Museum at the College of the Ozarks south of Branson, Mo = https://www.rfostermuseum.com/Visit
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
____________
Suggested edit: Several divorce cases were disposed of Thursday, among others that of Mrs. Rose O'Neill-Latham vs. Gray Latham. Mrs. Latham was granted a divorce, the defendant failing to appear.
Source: Taney County Republican, Forsyth, MO. 25 Apr 1901, Image 5. Chronicling America Newspapers.
Contributor: FG user # (47849893)
_________________
Suggested edit: this paper mentions Rose O'Neill's sister coming to visit her = https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90061308/1909-12-03/ed-1/seq-10/#date1=1789&index=13&rows=20&words=Neill+O+O%27Neill+Rose&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=Missouri&date2=1963&proxtext=Rose+O%27Neill&y=9&x=8&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
Contributor: FG user # (47849893
______________
Suggested edit: I finished her biography for her blog - http://the-history-nut-of-missouri.blogspot.com/2020/02/rose-oneill.html
Contributor: FG user # (47849893.
_______________________
Father link provided by FG user # 47830669.
Corrections on first and middle name provided by FG user # 47481674.∼Missouri Death Certificate: #14710
Name: Rose O'Neill
Sex: Female
Race: White
Usual Occupation: Artist + writer
Marital Status: Single
Death Age: 69 years, 9 months, 11 days.
Birth Date: June 25, 1874
Birth Place: Wilkes-Barrie, Penn.
Death Date: April 6, 1944, at 3:00 a.m.
Death Place: Springfield, Green County, Missouri
Cause of Death: Heart failure; Paralysis: Endocarditis, which affected Mitral valve in malignant form.
Father: William Patrick O'Neill (b. Unk.)
Mother: Aseneth Cecilia Smith (b. Wilkes-Barre, Penn)
Informant: Sister of Deceased, Callista O'Neill.
Burial: Bonnie Brook, Mo.
._______
ROSE O'NEILL INFUSED HER KEWPIES
WITH SPIRIT OF A RARE PERSONALITY.
Little Elves Which Charmed the World Represented but One Side of a Versatile Woman Who Rounded Out International Career as Artist and Writer With a Rich Adventure in Living in Her Taney County, Missouri Retreat.
At 3 o'clock yesterday morning Rose O'Neill died at the age of 69 at the home of a nephew in Springfield, Mo. In the afternoon some of her relatives and neighbors gathered at Bonniebrook, where she was buried beside her mother and a brother, "with only the simple woods as witness."
By Louis Mecker.
THE sensation of Rose O'Neill's career was the Kewpie dolls out of which she earned a fortune while still a young woman. It was at Bonniebrook, her secluded Taney County, Missouri, home that she dreamed the little elves into existence.
From an early age she had been illustrating stories for the national magazines and got in the habit of making head and tail pieces with cupids in them regular cupids. They were very slim compared with the soft, rounded Kewpies that came later. One day Edward Bok, editor of Ladies Home Journal, cut out a lot of those cupids, sent them to Miss O'Neill and asked if she could make a serial story of them. He offered to have the stories put into verse for her, but she told him she would do that little chore herself.
With their top-knot, wide smile and sidelong eyes, Kewpies first appeared in drawings and verses in 1909. Miss O'Neill indicated their origin In a couplet:
They're Kewpies, short for cupids: thus
They're shorter than that famous cuss.
They were bursting with kindness, their creator explained, because "their hearts were as well rounded as their tummies."
In the Ladies' Home Journal the drawings and verses followed each other month after month and later in Good Housekeeping, Woman's Home Companion and the Delineator. The Kewpie philosophy grew and spread; it was all in the Kewpie smile. Children began writing to Miss O'Neill, asking if she couldn't make them a Kewpie they could hold in their hands.
"Just for fun," she said, "I molded a little statue of a Kewpie. Then the doll factories got the idea. I selected a factory, and the thing was done."
with a $2000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss There at Bonniebrook where father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one Wilson wrote and she Illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and Lions of the Lord"
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri It was there Wilson and Tarklngton wrote their hit play Man From Home" After their return to America Miss separated from Wilson
With Kewple gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri She purchased Carabas a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport Conn and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with
The Dolls Travel Far.
By 1913 the dolls were all over the world. The first ones were made of bisque In Germany. Miss O'Neill went there and molded nine statues of different sizes. She took pains to see each model came out a perfect Kewpie and took particular pains with the smallest because as she said that would be the one for the poor children. Before the first World war began, about thirty factories were making them as fast as they could pull them out of the ovens. Later they were made of various materials in the United States. A volume of cheap models were manufactured in Japan. Miss O'Neill's latest contract, for manufacture of Kewie and Scooties dolls, was signed March 1, 1944, with the Cameo Doll company of New York.
Two other doll creations followed the Kewpie. Scooties, the baby tourist, is playmate of the Kewpies in the Kewpie stories. Scooties is a human baby, not an elf, but she has an elfin smile of her own; funny, clumsy baby legs, and hands in infantile positions never seen on any doll before. Then there is Ho-Ho, created In 1940, a sort of baby Buddha, sitting with a sympathetic laugh spread over his face, infecting with cheer all who look at him. "His philosophy," said Miss O'Neill, goes farther even than the Kewpie smile. I believe the wisdom of the ages is expressed by laughter."
A poet friend once said to Miss O'Neill that no one could make a Kewpie who couldn't make a good sonnet. And he was right, because Miss O'Neill wrote sonnets as well as well as other poetry--and novels and short stories.
Poetry and Music.
"Oh, I monkey with so many things." she once exclaimed. "I can't even keep my hands off pianos." Several of her poems she set to music and used to delight her friends, particularly with "When I Was Young and Dear," which she would sing with a sounding emphasis:
And few there are who live alas,
And they are far from here,
Who know how young and dear I was
When I was young and dear.
"I never know how anything comes to me." she said "There doesn't seem to be any Intelligence In it. Especially with a poem. I never can remember how it arrived. Of course in making a finished drawing, it lasts long enough for me to notice that there's something going on. And the business of making a sculpture is such an endless job that the agony tells me I am certainly up to something.
The dolls might be said to belong to the celestial section of Miss O'Neill's sculptural art. There is another department which she called the monster section. Visitors to Bonniebrook, the many-gabled green house wedged between brook and hillside deep in the arms of two cedar-plumed hills, see examples of this section. On the sloping lawn is a statue of a "woman faun," reclining In the grass. A symbol of developing life, she has hoofs, goat's legs, a woman's torso and no face--just a lifted mass that could be sculptured into features. The face is waiting for its soul, the final climb from the beast.
Another statue, ten feet high, is called "The Embrace of the Tree," symbolizing the passion for Nature herself. A monstrous nude man is almost crouched with the intensity of his clasp. The trunk of the tree in his arms has roughly the shape of a woman, without a head The man's head Is buried among the branches.
Art Exhibited In Paris.
Included In this section of her art are her "monster drawings" those strange, gigantic creatures embodying what she called "the epic of evolution." In 1922 Miss O'Neill exhibited in the Paris salon a collection of these drawings portraying primitive emotions of the race. Fauns, satyrs, centaurs and other mythical creatures were presented to symbolize the union of the animal and the divine. As a result she was elected an associate ot the Societe des Beaux Arts.
Recently Miss O'Neill completed the manuscript of her autobiography. It is the story of an extraordinarily gifted whimsical and charming personality. Born June 25 1874 at Wilkes-Barre, Pa., she was christened Rose Cecil. Her parents were William Patrick O'Neill, a bookseller and Alice Asenath Cecelia Smith O'Neill.
Her father had a romantic Irish nature with a never-stilled impulsion for seeking new horizons, and by the time Rose was of school age the family, which eventually included five other children, was living at Omaha, Neb. There she attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart. By 15 she had become a self-taught illustrator and putting aside her original intention of becoming an actress, she went to New York for further study, entering the Convent of the Sisters of St. Regis on Riverside drive.
At 19 she married Gray Latham a young Virginian living in New York City. After a few years they separated. In connection with her work as an illustrator she became acquainted with the editor of Puck, Harry Leon Wilson. In 1902 Wilson resigned his position and with a $2,000 publisher's advance, went to Taney County and married Miss O'Neill. There at Bonniebrook, where Rose's father had established a new horizon after tiring of the Nebraska one, Wilson wrote and she illustrated his novels "The Spenders" and "The Lions of the Lord."
On the Isle of Capri.
In 1905, with Mr. and Mrs. Booth Tarklngton, they went to Italy and rented the Ellhu Vedder villa on the Island of Capri. It was there Wilson and Tarkington wrote their hit play, "The Man From Home." After their return to America, Miss O'Neill separated from Wilson.
With Kewpie gold she enlarged the Bonniebrook house and acquired the Villa Narcissus in Capri. She purchased Carabas, a fine place on the Saugatuck river near Westport, Conn., and for several years she maintained a studio apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Wherever she lived she entertained her friends with that rare charm which lay in her imputing importance to everyone she met and in regarding every literary and artistic acquaintance as a potential genius. Usually attired In a wine-colored flowing velvet robe, dark honey colored hair curled on her shoulders like a medieval page, she sat for hours with her guests reading Francis Thompson aloud, listening to Bach recordings and smoking cigarettes.
Miss O'Neill's alter ego and constant companion, except for a few intervals of marriage and foreign travel, was her sunny unselfish sister Kallista, nine years her junior. Kallista figures in some of the most feeling poems of her 227-page volume of collected verse, "The Master-Mistress."
Years before the end of her life Miss O'Neill's Irish openhandedness had let her Kewpie fortune slip away. The Villa Narcissus was last in the confusion of the second World war and Carabas was liquidated. Even Bonniebrook saw lean days but there true lover of nature that she was, Miss O'Neill to the last defended against tiller and lumber-man every acre of bird-nesting bush and every crest of green shadowing cedar.
The strictest critics' estimates were that Miss O'Neill's as a poet had undeniable if erratic gifts. They acclaimed her charming humor as an illustrator. To her later novels, the allegorical "Garda" and the unconventional "Goblin Woman" they ascribed "excessive Celticism."
The list of Rose O'Neil's principal books includes the following: "The Loves of Edwy," 1904; "The Lady in the White Veil," 1909; "Kewpies and Dottie Darling," 1913; "Kewpies: Their Book, Verse and Poetry," 1913; "Kewpie Kutouts," 1914; "The Master-Mistress," 1922; "Kewpies and the Runaway Baby," 1928; "Garda," 1929; "The Goblin Woman," 1930.
The Kansas City Times
Kansas City, Missouri
Friday, April 7, 1944, p. 18
.
Gravesite Details
Creator of the Kewpies and other artwork
