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.