Puck Easter

Leon V. Solon's cover for Puck's Easter issue shows a young man in a green tailcoat bowing forward as he presents an elaborately decorated hatbox to a seated woman in a floral crinoline dress and bonnet. The word EASTER appears in a cartouche between them. There is no satirical caption and no identifiable political target; this is one of Puck's periodic decorative covers, where the humor magazine set aside its usual partisan bite for seasonal imagery. Solon, better known as a ceramicist and designer, brings an Art Nouveau flatness to the figures—curling foliage, bold outline, rich red-and-green palette. The cover carries no ethnic caricature. It reads simply as Edwardian courtship ritual dressed in holiday finery, selling copies at ten cents.