ComicBook Experience

From the exhibition

A Cuban Girl

Grace Drayton · c. 1923

A Cuban Girl
Here the signature reads "Drayton," and the drawing is unmistakably hers: a young woman's face built from a few soft pencil strokes, hair bobbed close, eyes large and knowing, the mouth just short of a smile. It ran in a Havana society magazine, which introduced her to Spanish readers as the American artist who, like Rose O'Neill with the Kewpies, had made her little figures — her *muñequitos* — famous, and whose Dolly Dimples girls were known everywhere. The note promised more of her drawings in the next issue. That a clean example of her portrait work reached us at all is partly luck, and partly that it traveled abroad, into a magazine that treated an American woman cartoonist as a name worth printing large.

Grace Drayton Public domain