McMein, Neysa (1888–1949)

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McMein, Neysa (1888–1949)

American commercial illustrator and portraitist . Name variations: Marjory Edna McMein. Born Margary Edna McMein on January 24, 1888, in Quincy, Illinois; died on May 12, 1949, in New York City; daughter of Harry Moran McMein (a newspaper editor) and Isabelle Lee (Parker) McMein; attended School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League; married John Gordon Baragwanath (an engineer and writer), on May 18, 1923; children: daughter Joan Gordon Baragwanath; stepson.

Sold first drawing (1914); sold first magazine cover (1915); rode in dirigible airship (1916); hired by McCall's (1923).

Perhaps the first female artist ever to be invited to the White House to execute a portrait of a sitting president, Neysa McMein was born in 1888 in Quincy, Illinois, where her father was a newspaper editor. After high school, she went to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, supplementing the small allowance her parents sent her by playing the piano in movie theaters and the organ in church; she also worked as a sales assistant to a milliner and then as a hat designer. With a friend who had ambitions for the stage, McMein moved to New York City in

1913, around the age of 25. There a numerologist suggested the name "Neysa," which she used for the rest of her life. Thriving within the cultural scene in the city, she appeared as a stage extra in opera productions and took classes at the Art Students League. After working as a sketcher and clothing designer for Butterick, the patternmaker, in 1915 McMein sold her first magazine cover, to the Saturday Evening Post. From that point, her career as a commercial artist was well underway, in part because the women she drew looked as intelligent as they did attractive, which was a far cry from the doe-eyed, gamine-like females that were then standard magazine or advertisement fare.

McMein did magazine covers for the best-known publications of the era, including Collier's and the Women's Home Companion. Her pastel illustrations were on the covers of every issue of McCall's magazine between 1923 and 1937, for which she was paid $2,500 per cover, a small fortune in those days. She also continued to do commercial illustrations, and her work was used to sell a range of products, from Palmolive soap to Lucky Strike cigarettes to Betty Crocker baking mixes. She donated sketches to illustrate the annual "One Hundred Neediest Cases" Christmas giving campaign of The New York Times.

An avid athlete and adventurous traveler who once rode 100 miles on a camel through North Africa, McMein was considered a devastatingly attractive blonde. During World War I, she worked as a lecturer and entertainer for the YMCA in France, and in 1916 was invited by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin to fly in his new invention, the dirigible airship; she and her friend Beulah Livingstone , who later handled publicity for McMein, were probably the first American women to take such a ride. (The experience went quickly out of fashion after the dirigible Hindenburg exploded in 1937.) She also wrote a screenplay, Three Miles Out, as well as songs, short stories, and magazine articles. In 1923, McMein married a mining engineer and writer of adventure stories, John Gordon Baragwanath, with whom she had what has been called an unconventional but happy marriage; the couple had one daughter.

About this time, as the use of color photographs for magazine covers started narrowing the market for her commercial work, McMein began to devote more time to oil portraiture. She painted portraits of two sitting presidents, Warren G. Harding (c. 1922) and Herbert Hoover (c.1931), and of many other well-known figures of the day, including Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Beatrice Lillie , Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Parker ,Edna St. Vincent Millay , and Janet Flanner , but she never gained serious recognition as an artist, in part due to her work as a commercial illustrator. Many of the artists and entertainers she painted were personal friends; McMein was a vivid figure in New York's literary scene, and was a frequent diner at the "Vicious Circle" table at the Hotel Algonquin presided over by Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Her New York painting studio was a gathering place for these friends and others, including Irving Berlin and Edna Ferber . During Prohibition, she made her own liquor in the bathtub there. Neysa McMein died in 1949, after suffering an embolism during surgery for cancer.