Puck Easter

Louis M. Glackens's cover for Puck No. 1362 (price: ten cents) stages a small Easter allegory in three figures against a flat green ground. The Easter Bunny—anthropomorphized in a conductor's cap, spectacles, checked cravat, and blue trousers—extends a wicker basket of colored eggs toward a rosy-cheeked girl in a pink dress and white apron. Rather than accepting a gift, she is plundering the basket: eggs already fill her apron pocket, others lie cracked on the ground, and a bonneted hen looks on from the right with apparent disapproval. The wordless joke is purely domestic and generational—childhood greed overwhelming adult charity—with no political target. Glackens, younger brother of the Ashcan painter William, contributed frequently to Puck's color covers during this period, and the image carries no ethnic caricature beyond its broadly sentimental, Gibson-era prettiness.