Mary Petty's New Yorker Covers

 

Chris Ware, writing for The New Yorker, profiles Mary Petty (1899 - 1976), in his article The Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich. I think this may be behind a pay wall if you don't have a subscription, but I wanted to show some of her work and talk about her. 

Mary Dunn, who had no formal art training, had her first illustration in The New Yorker in 1926. She would have 219 cartoons published, as well as 38 covers. All of her work is to be lingered over. So many details to see.

She was married to fellow New Yorker cartoonist Alan Dunn, making them, as Michael Maslin points out, the first of the married New Yorker cartoonists.

"Petty’s covers are defined by specific people—indeed, by a specific family, the Peabodys, who are recognizable by their faces and their moneyed social position, as well as by a peculiar loneliness. The family most often appears ensconced in a large brownstone, and they’re led by the elderly dowager Mrs. Peabody, who clings to her wealth as modernity and irrelevance creep through the walls."

" ... Mrs. Peabody’s foil in the series is Fay, a servant girl who looks after her increasingly isolated matron, and whose own life seems to pass by just as invisibly. In 1948, Fay stands at the top of a shadowed staircase, listening to musicians play at a ball below. On December 31, 1949, she blows a toy trumpet through the burglar bars of a ground-floor window. In perhaps Petty’s most existential cover, Fay, while polishing a silver pitcher, is stopped by the fun-house reflection of her face. One looks for something to laugh at, but the longer one looks, the less funny it gets."

 

Mary Petty disappeared in December 1971. Her husband found her in a hospital. She had been physically assaulted and suffered severe brain damage. She would pass away in a nursing home in 1976.