Puck's Palette

Joseph Keppler crams an entire artist's studio into a single painter's palette. On the wooden oval, a mustachioed figure—likely a self-portrait of Puck's star cartoonist—presides over a crowd of women whose oversized hats sprout blobs of pure pigment: green, purple, red, yellow, white. To the left, a rotund figure in a top hat represents big business rendered as a pig, a stock Gilded Age shorthand for robber-baron greed. Brushes and a rolled canvas spill across the foreground. The caption reads Puck's Palette: A Little Memento Found in Our Artist's Studio After His Departure for Europe, framing the whole sheet as a fond farewell joke. The caricature of the financier as swine reflects Puck's consistent anti-monopoly politics of the 1880s, when Keppler used grotesque animal imagery to lampoon capitalist excess for a largely immigrant, Democratic-leaning readership.