Puck, Study for Manufactures Building

This preparatory sketch depicts Puck, the mischievous sprite from Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, posed as an allegorical figure. The winged youth holds architect's tools and gestures toward industrial progress—a fitting emblem for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Artist J. Carroll Beckwith rendered the figure in ink over gridded paper, a standard transfer method for monumental public art. The cartoon's joyful energy and classical reference exemplify how turn-of-the-century illustrators blended Old World mythology with New World optimism, visual traditions that would soon migrate into the emerging newspaper comic strip.