Wedding Day, New Year's Eve 1918

This hand-colored lithograph satirizes a New Year's Eve wedding, depicting a groom in formal dress alongside a bride whose elaborate white gown and towering headdress dominate the composition. The caricatured figures—with exaggerated facial features typical of early 20th-century comic imagery—suggest marital anxiety or social pretension. A small figure in the background observes the scene. The print exemplifies the European tradition of satirical wedding imagery descending from Hogarth and Daumier, where matrimonial ceremonies became occasions for commentary on class, gender roles, and domestic life. Such prints, popular as affordable lithographed broadsheets, circulated widely among working and middle-class audiences, blending folk humor with social observation—a direct ancestor to the comic strip format emerging in newspapers of this era.