Mary Engelbreit

Mary Engelbreit’s art begins, in her own telling, with a very practical revelation: in second grade she got eyeglasses and could suddenly see the details of the world around her clearly. Born on June 5, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, where she still lives, Engelbreit grew up with an eye trained on small things. At age 9, after meeting her first artist, she decided she needed a studio of her own. Her mother helped make it happen in the family linen closet, a modest start that suited a child already serious about drawing.

Engelbreit first worked for a local advertising company, Hot Buttered Graphics. She hoped to illustrate children’s books and took her portfolio to New York, but success did not come there. Greeting cards opened another door. Her first nationally distributed card played on “Life is just a bowl of cherries,” showing a girl looking at a chair piled with bowls and the caption, “Life is just a chair of bowlies.” That mix of wordplay, domestic charm, and crisp visual storytelling became a natural home for her work.

In 1982, she founded Mary Engelbreit Co., first located in Webster Groves, Missouri, and later moved in 1994 to a former Greek Orthodox church in University City. In 1986, Engelbreit and her husband, Phil Delano, a social worker whom she married in 1977, formed Mary Engelbreit Studios. As her card line grew, her illustrations were licensed for calendars, T-shirts, mugs, gift books, rubber stamps, ceramic figurines, and fabric. By 1996, her company reported $86 million in sales per year, and Mary Engelbreit stores operated in St. Louis; Schaumburg, Illinois; Dallas; Denver; and Alpharetta, Georgia.

Her reach extended well beyond greeting cards. Starting in 1996, Engelbreit served as editor-in-chief of the bi-monthly creative lifestyle magazine Mary Engelbreit’s Home Companion. Her books for children found a large readership: The Night Before Christmas, illustrated by Engelbreit, reached #5 on the New York Times bestseller list, while Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose debuted at #6 and remained on the list for four weeks. Mary Engelbreit’s Mother Goose and A Night of Great Joy received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, and Mary Engelbreit’s A Merry Little Christmas received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. In 2019, she designed sets for the St. Louis Muny’s production of Matilda.

Engelbreit’s personal life has also shaped the public story around her work. She and Delano had two children, Evan and Will; Evan died in June 2000, and Engelbreit and her husband adopted his daughter, Mikayla. She has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In more recent years, she has supported Black Lives Matter and created art inspired by the mother of Michael Brown. Even when her images are playful, her words can carry a brisk kind of courage. “Don’t look back. You are not going that way” fits the spirit of an artist who kept finding new forms for her drawings, from a linen closet studio to books, cards, calendars, and beyond.