Rose Cecil O’Neill was born on June 25, 1874, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her parents were William Patrick Henry and Alice Cecilia Asenath Senia Smith O’Neill. She had two sisters—Lee and Callista—and three brothers—Hugh, James, and Clarence. O’Neill’s father was a bookseller of Irish descent who loved literature, art, and theatre. Her mother was a gifted musician, actress, and teacher. As a young girl, O’Neill traveled with her family in a Conestoga wagon to rural Nebraska. There she grew up in a loving family that actively supported each member’s artistic and intellectual interests.

Rose O’Neill revealed her talents as a writer and artist at a young age. She won a drawing contest for the Omaha World-Herald when she was thirteen. At age nineteen, O’Neill traveled alone to New York City to sell her first novel. She brought with her a portfolio of sixty illustrations and sketches and showed them to various New York magazine editors and publishers. Editors admired her artwork and gave her commissions for illustrations and commercial posters. O’Neill’s career as a professional artist had begun.

By her early twenties, O’Neill was nationally known for her illustrations in popular magazines such as Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Home Companion. She also drew hundreds of cartoons for the humorous magazine Puck. During this period of her life O’Neill had two brief marriages, the first to Gray Latham in 1896 and then to Harry Leon Wilson in 1902. She remained single after 1907.

While O’Neill worked as an artist in New York City, her family moved from Nebraska to a homestead in Taney County, Missouri. When she visited her family for the first time in Missouri, O’Neill fell in love with the enchanting Ozark mountains, woods, and streams. She named their charming farmstead “Bonniebrook” and returned to it throughout her working career. Near the end of her life, O’Neill retired there.

Bonniebrook and the surrounding Ozark woods became a source of artistic inspiration for O’Neill. At Bonniebrook, surrounded by her loving family, Rose O’Neill first dreamed of and created the cute, good-natured characters that would make her world famous.

O’Neill’s Kewpies made their first appearance as character drawings in a women’s magazine in December 1909. Kewpies were fanciful, elf-like babies with a top-knot head, a wide smile, and sidelong eyes. They were both impish and kind and solved all kinds of problems in humorous ways. O’Neill described them as “a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time.” The Kewpies were immediately popular with both children and adults.

In 1913 O’Neill patented a doll based on the Kewpie character. She oversaw the making of the first Kewpie dolls originally produced in Germany. The dolls were sold all over the world along with a vast array of Kewpie merchandise such as tableware, fabrics, and trinkets.

By 1914 O’Neill was the highest-paid female illustrator in America. Her income allowed her to support her family in Missouri and travel extensively in Europe. There she easily made friends with fellow artists and writers and hosted expensive parties. In this lively environment, O’Neill produced her serious art, much of which she labeled her “Sweet Monster” art. Influenced by European artists and her own Irish-American upbringing, O’Neill merged mythic-like figures with animal traits and pushed them into extreme and unusual poses in her paintings and sculptures. Her fine art exhibits, in both Paris and New York, revealed a much different side to her artistic personality. O’Neill’s strange, intertwining shapes—twirling amid a whirlwind of decorative elements—created a kind of fantastical art that both enthralled and challenged her admirers.

In addition to her illustrations in magazines, books, and newspapers, Rose O’Neill also wrote children’s books featuring the Kewpies, as well as novels and poetry. O’Neill explored the creative process and the complex relationship between women and men in her novels and poems. Despite her success as an artist and writer, O’Neill could not vote in public elections because she was a woman. O’Neill worked diligently, along with her sister Callista, to support the suffragist movement. She drew posters and cartoons and marched in protest parades. Her efforts helped women gain the right to vote in 1920.