The Kewpie doll has been with us since 1909, more or less. In that year, comical illustrations of their inspirations first appeared by Rose O’Neill in the Ladies’ Home Journal—who once said dreams of little Cupids, during the aftermath of her second divorce, prompted her to draw the images in the first place. Three years later, the little dolls first produced of bisque and celluloid in the German toymaking town of Ohrdruf, and recognizable almost at once for their trademark curl of hair at the very top of their heads, were based on the O’Neill images and authorized by O’Neill herself.

By 1939, Kewpie was considered worthy of inclusion in the famous New York World’s Fair time capsule; by 1949, Kewpie was graduated to hard plastic, courtesy first of the Effanbee Company. Kewpie even turned up in one of the most harrowing documents of the Holocaust—Anne Frank received a Kewpie as a gift from Miep Gies and Elisabeth Voskuijl (Otto Frank’s secretary) while the Frank family was hidden from the Nazis, and Anne mentioned the gift in her diary.


Today, vintage Kewpie dolls are considered highly collectible and worth up to the thousands, but many of them can be found in excellent condition for prices at $200 or less. Various sellers on eBay offer several vintage Kewpies for such prices, but some are a little more expensive—including at least one hard-to-find Kewpie painted in black skin and made between 1920 and 1930.  A doll such as this might go for five to six hundred dollars.

One of the larger Kewpies prized by collectors is a 27-inch Cameo Kewpie doll, made in 1966 of all vinyl with clean if slightly stretched clothes, a little scuffing on her shoe bottoms, but paint in good condition and no stains or other marks noticeable on her body. Such a doll recently sold on another site for $275.

However, to many if not most Kewpie collectors, the dolls made between the 1920s and the 1930s are the prizes of the hunt. These eleven-inch dolls, made of composition, are hard enough to find as it is, but if you find one with its original box—even harder to find than the doll itself, it could drive the price into the neighborhood of $475 for the complete package.

You may see Kewpies turning up at various antique toy shops and collectors’ gatherings, but there is one no-questions-asked way to tell you are getting a truly vintage Kewpie, especially from their earliest heights of popularity: the red heart chest patch says “KEWPIE: Des. & Copyright by Rose O’Neill.”

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