That's Mrs. Peabody's maid, Fay, having a little dust up with a Henry Moore sculpture in Mary Petty's apparently unpublished original illustration.
Many a mid-century cartoonist made fun of Moore's modern sculptures; Petty goes for the obvious gag but she shows no apparent disrespect. Rather, she has poor Fay going to impractical extremes in order to get her housework done. It's an awkward image for the usually graceful Fay; in fact all the poise resides in the Moore work. This is a study in contrasts: Fay is black-and-white, angular, off-balance, while the reclining figure is colorful, rounded, sturdy. All this might have worked as an amusing cover for The New Yorker; very likely it was submitted and even considered by the editors. Still, one can almost imagine the magazine's founding editor Harold Ross, something of a literalist, demanding to know why Fay couldn't just as easily go around the sculpture as through it.
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| Detail of maid and sculpture |
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| Mary Petty's signature |
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| Verso |
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| The verso bears a Greek stamp and a notation. The letters at the top look tantalizingly like an O.K. The writing resembles printer's marks. Was this piece in fact published? |
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| Tape residue is affixed to the bottom of the art. Who puts tape on a Henry Moore? |
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More tape residue is on the left side of the art.
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Mary Petty
Chairish listing accessed March 19, 2022
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03961
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