Easter Puck

Louis M. Glackens's cover for Puck No. 1257 (price: ten cents) pairs two stock figures in quiet comic tension. In the middle ground, the magazine's imp-mascot struts in a musketeer's scarlet doublet and plumed cap, flanked by two upright white rabbits bearing Easter eggs; more rabbits scatter into a spring-green background of birch trees. In the foreground, a rotund, tonsured monk in a coarse brown habit reads a small book through wire-rimmed spectacles, entirely oblivious to the pagan Easter parade behind him. The juxtaposition is the joke: secular, commercial Easter celebration marches on while institutional religion stares inward at its own text. Puck routinely lampooned Catholic clergy as insular and worldly—a strain of anti-clerical Protestant humor common in Gilded Age illustrated press.