A Happy New Year 1867 – A Happy New Year 1917

Rea Irvin (1881–1972) sets two New Year's scenes fifty years apart in pointed contrast. The left panel pictures a Victorian parlor in 1867: a crinoline-skirted mother, a mustachioed father, and a small daughter take tea beneath a gas chandelier and a framed ancestor portrait, the fireplace gleaming behind them—propriety made architectural. The right panel, dated 1917, erupts in a public restaurant: a man in top hat dances on the table, two men play leapfrog across the floor, champagne corks arc through the air, and a large woman in a strapless gown drains her glass with theatrical abandon. Irvin's joke is generational decay—or liberation, depending on one's politics—as Gilded Age decorum collapses into Jazz Age excess. The cartoon appeared in *Life*'s humor pages the year before Prohibition debates crested, giving the champagne imagery real legislative bite. Irvin would become the founding art editor of *The New Yorker* in 1925.