Established 2014 · London
Ravelstein
Rare Books, Signed First Editions & Letters
MP
❦ ❦ ❦
Biography
American

Mary Petty

1899 — 1976

American illustrator and cartoonist whose covers and cartoons for The New Yorker from the 1920s through the 1960s depicted a rarefied world of old New York society — chandeliers, brownstones, ancestral portraits, and the minor catastrophes of upper-class domestic life. Her distinctive pen-and-ink style created an immediately recognisable visual world of genteel absurdity. She was married to the artist Alan Dunn, also a New Yorker contributor.

Past sales0
PeriodModernist
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Mary Petty (1899–1976) was an American illustrator and cartoonist who contributed covers, spot illustrations, and cartoons to The New Yorker for over four decades. Her visual world was a distinctive fantasy of old New York: grand interiors with marble fireplaces, ancestral portraits, and imposing furniture, inhabited by a recurring cast of upper-class matrons, bewildered servants, and lapdog-carrying dowagers.

Her work captured the comedy of gentility in decline — not mocking the old order so much as observing its peculiarities with tender precision.

This Petty Pace — a collection of her New Yorker cartoons and illustrations — gathers her characteristic visual world into book form.

Collecting Petty

This Petty Pace and collections of her New Yorker work are collected by enthusiasts of American illustration and New Yorker history. Original drawings and preliminary sketches occasionally appear at auction. Her work is closely associated with the magazine’s mid-century golden age.