Mary Petty, the Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich

In the pantheon of New York Artists, the name of Mary Petty does not look at barely. But in her time, she was part of a group of women – Helen E. Hokinson, Edna Eicke, Ilonka Karasz and Barbara Shermund among them – who brought well -known and beloved drawings and paintings to a magazine which was then largely dominated by men. Petty (1899-1976) was married to one of these men, Alan Dunn, who published nearly two thousand caricatures The New Yorker. They spent almost all their lives together in a small apartment on the ground floor on the 12 East Highty-eighth Street, Dunn working at a drawing table in the living room and mean in a small board in their bedroom. Petty – who had attended high school in Horace Mann, in the Bronx – had no training in official art, and she was sometimes called Dunn, perhaps joking, like her “pupil”. But a year after his first drawing appeared in The New YorkerIn 1926, his followed.

May 24, 1941.

In addition to publishing two hundred nineteen caricatures, Petty has contributed to a series of thirty-eight bright colored covers, beautifully detailed and perfectly composed, which, at least in this opinion of the New York artist, have never been exceeded in their complexity, their wealth and, above all, their human. THE Times Described them, in Petty’s Billology, like “drawings of frozen patricians in the forefront world of the croquet”. They are much more. Petty’s cartoons are undeniably funny, formulated in sustainability that I imagine having an effect on the young Edward Gorey. But his covers have opened this world further; These are shiny exquisite construction watercolors, rooms with the charm and detail of a house of a doll. For Petty, the gag was just an excuse to enter the door. His eye was extraordinary, evoking an Edwardian era through its smaller characteristics: brock wallpaper, finely tiled kitchen floors, thin brass taps, plush padding.