Margaret Evans Price was a U.S. toy manufacturer. With her husband, Irving Price

Irving Price

Irving Lanouette Price was a U.S. toy manufacturer. He was the co-founder and co-eponym of Fisher-Price Toys in 1930. On 23 February 1909, he married the children's book illustrator and artist Margaret Evans Price...

, and Herman Fisher

Herman Fisher

Herman Guy Fisher , was born in Unionville Pennsylvania. He is best known as the co-founder of the famous toy brand Fisher-Price.-Biography:Herman G. Fisher was born in Unionville, Pennsylvania in 1898...

, she co-founded Fisher-Price Toys

Fisher-Price

Fisher-Price is a company that produces toys for infants and children, headquartered in East Aurora, New York. Fisher-Price has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Mattel since 1993.-History:...

 in 1930. Margaret Evans was a children's book

Children's literature

Children's literature is for readers and listeners up to about age twelve; it is often defined in four different ways: books written by children, books written for children, books chosen by children, or books chosen for children. It is often illustrated. The term is used in senses which sometimes...

 illustrator

Illustrator

An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...

 and artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

. She became the first Art Director of Fisher-Price

Fisher-Price

Fisher-Price is a company that produces toys for infants and children, headquartered in East Aurora, New York. Fisher-Price has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Mattel since 1993.-History:...

 and designed push-pull toys for the opening line, based on characters from her children's books.

Family

Margaret was a member of the wealthy Evans

Evans

Evans may refer to:people*Evans *for a particular person with the surname, see the List of people with surname Evans.place*Evans, California in the United States*Evans, Colorado in the United States*Evans, Georgia in the United States...

 family of New York who for a time had an effective monopoly on the building material

Building material

Building material is any material which is used for a construction purpose. Many naturally occurring substances, such as clay, sand, wood and rocks, even twigs and leaves have been used to construct buildings. Apart from naturally occurring materials, many man-made products are in use, some more...

 industry in the City. Margaret's Brother Heathcliff expanded his Father's business operations to include a book binding business which at its peak encompassed a complex of buildings on East 12th Street in Manhattan. Margaret's Cousin was Republican Politician & Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes, Sr. was an American statesman, lawyer and Republican politician from New York. He served as the 36th Governor of New York , Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States , United States Secretary of State , a judge on the Court of International Justice , and...

.

Career

Margaret Evans began her art career at an early age, and sold her first illustrated story to the Boston Journal in 1900. She attended high school in Charleston, Massachusetts, and went on to study at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. From there, she went on to study at the Boston Academy of Fine Arts under the tutelage of Joseph DeCamp

Joseph DeCamp

Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was an American painter.-Biography:Born in Cincinnati, Ohio where he studied with Frank Duveneck. In the second half of the 1870s he went with Duveneck and fellow students to the Royal Academy of Munich...

 and Vesper George. Before she married Irving Price, Evans worked as a freelance

Freelancer

A freelancer, freelance worker, or freelance is somebody who is self-employed and is not committed to a particular employer long term. These workers are often represented by a company or an agency that resells their labor and that of others to its clients with or without project management and...

 artist in New York City, publishing with Rand McNally

Rand McNally

Rand McNally is an American publisher of maps, atlases, textbooks, and globes for travel, reference, commercial, and educational uses. It also provides online consumer street maps and directions, as well as commercial transportation routing software and mileage data...

, Harper & Brothers

Harper & Brothers

Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins.-History:James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishing business J. & J. Harper in 1817. Their two brothers, Joseph Wesley Harper and Fletcher Harper, joined them...

 and Strecher Lithography After the formation of Fisher-Price, Margaret went on to exhibit her work in many galleries nationally. She was also published in Nature Magazine, the Women's Home Companion, and Pictorial Review

Pictorial Review

Pictorial Review is a magazine which first appeared in September, 1899. The magazine was originally designed to showcase dress patterns of William Paul Ahnelt's American Fashion Company. By the late 1920s it was one of the largest of the "women's magazines"....

.