A NOVELIST IN COVERS

The mystery of Mary Petty.

- CHRIS WARE

A photograph of the artist from her high-school yearbook, 1918.

In the pantheon of New Yorker artists, the name Mary Petty hardly registers. But in her time she was one of a group of women—Helen E. Hokinson, Edna Eicke, Ilonka Karasz, and Barbara Shermund among them—who contributed well-known, well-loved drawings and paintings to a magazine that was then largely dominated by men. Petty (1899-1976) was married to one such man, Alan Dunn, who published close to two thousand cartoons in The New Yorker.

They spent nearly all their life together in a small ground-floor apartment at 12 East Eighty-eighth Street, Dunn working at a drawing table in the living area and Petty at a small board in their bedroom. Petty—who had attended high school at Horace Mann, in the Bronx—had no formal art training, and she was sometimes referred to by Dunn, perhaps jokingly, as his “student.” But a year after his first drawing appeared in The New Yorker, in 1926, hers followed.

In addition to publishing two hundred and nineteen cartoons, Petty contributed a series of thirty-eight vividly colored, magnificently detailed, and flawlessly composed covers, which, at least in this New Yorker cover artist’s opinion, have never been surpassed in their complexity, their richness, and, most of all, their humanity.