Puck's Palette

Shaped like the tool that made the magazine, this centerfold is a palette crowded with the artist's preoccupations. Fashionable women in a parade of extravagant hats, green, purple, scarlet, gold, press together across the wooden oval, a mustachioed painter among them, brushes and a rolled portfolio at the edge. Tucked into the throng is a top-hatted pig, Puck's shorthand for fat, self-satisfied big business. The subtitle frames it as a keepsake found in the studio after the artist left for Europe: part valentine to pretty things, part reminder that even a decorative flight has room for a jab at capital. A palette standing in for the working cartoonist's eye, which could not look at anything for long without finding the caricature in it.