Christmas Puck

Frank A. Nankivell's cover for Puck's Christmas issue arranges the season's most coveted toys across a bright yellow ground in cheerful parade rows: jointed teddy bears march in a pack (a craze barely three years old in 1906), tin soldiers in red tunics and tall bearskin shakos stand at attention, honeycomb paper trees punctuate the ranks, and cloth dolls—a blonde girl in a pink dress, a clown, a harlequin figure rendered with the blackface minstrel caricature standard to commercial illustration of the period—fill the gaps. There is no overt political argument here; Puck offered its Christmas number as a gift-buying guide wrapped in humor. The minstrel figure, unremarked by contemporaries, reflects how casually racist visual shorthand saturated popular American print culture in the Progressive Era.