Wheeling on Riverside Drive

This engraving by Swedish-American artist Thure de Thulstrup depicts fashionable cyclists enjoying Riverside Drive in New York. The composition captures the social dimension of the bicycle craze of the 1880s, showing well-dressed riders—including a woman in bustled dress alongside men in jackets and caps—sharing the roadway. The artist's careful attention to mechanical detail in the bicycles and tricycles contrasts with the leisure activity itself. Published as newspaper illustration, such images helped establish visual conventions for depicting motion and social narrative that would become foundational to sequential art and early comic strips emerging in the Sunday newspaper pages of the 1890s.