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 joking

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