Dorothy King
Artist Bio:
Dorothy King (née Urfer) (1905-1984) began her art career with a comic strip about Annabel, a flapper-type girl, which she wrote and illustrated for six years for the Scripps-Howard NEA Syndicate. After marrying the head of the art department, she moved to New York City, where the couple ran a studio specializing in continuity strip advertising, a popular format at the time.
Later, they settled in Connecticut and Dorothy focused on raising their four children. Once her youngest started school, she returned to art with a new focus on her favorite subject: costume design, especially children’s clothing. She took her sketches to the art director of Whitman Publishing Co. and was commissioned to design the costumes for a Gene Autry paper doll book. She described herself as being on “cloud nine,” able to design and illustrate children’s clothes in full color. Among her many paper doll projects for Whitman, her favorite was Little Ballerina, a canister-style set designed to double as a ballet-slipper case. She also illustrated storybooks for Whitman and textbooks for Ginn and Company.
In the late 1960s Dorothy retired from commercial illustration and began specializing in restoring antique dolls, costuming them as children and continuing her lifelong love of children’s fashions. She later continued this work on a smaller scale.
Source: Adapted from Paper Dolls and Their Artists, Revised Edition by Mary Young (1993).
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Selected Titles:
Whitman Publishing Co.
Gene Autry (outfits only), #990 (1950)
Betty Hutton and Her Girls, #2099 (1951)
Little Ballerina (box/canister set), #4732 (1961)
Look Alike, #972 (1952)
Roy Rogers, #1186 (1950)
Saalfield Publishing Co.
School Chums, #2716, also #2616 (dolls only), undated
Schoolmates, #1757 (dolls only), undated
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