Gladys Emma Peto

Gladys Emma Peto (1890 in Maidenhead, Berkshire – 1977 in Northern Ireland) was an English artist, fashion designer, illustrator and writer of children's books.
Peto was well known throughout the United Kingdom in the 1920s and 1930s. Her obituary, appearing in The Times (London) in 1977, noted that in the 1930s it was the "in thing" to wear a Peto dress. Peto's advertising illustrations for infant formula, Ovaltine and many other products were prominently featured in magazines and posters.

Education

Peto attended Maidenhead High School and art classes in the town before heading off to London to study at art school there. She married Cuthbert Lindsay Emmerson of the Royal Army Medical Corps, and with him during the 1920s she traveled with him to Malta, Cyprus and Egypt.

Career

Sometime in the 1920s the Empire Annual for Australian Girls published Poster Art Work for Girls, A Talk With Miss Gladys Peto the Well-Known Poster Artist, where she would discuss her beginnings. Her family was not especially artistic. As a girl in Maidenhead, she would go out "in her father's trap" and notice interesting people along the way. She would get home and sketch them.

She retired from commercial art in 1946 and moved with her husband, who had retired from the Army, to Northern Ireland. She devoted her remaining years to painting landscapes in watercolors and to drawing and cultivating flowers. She suffered a stroke in 1970 that paralyzed her right, and dominant, hand, but continued to draw, paint and write with her left hand.