The New Year – 1869

Winslow Homer's allegorical illustration depicts the infant New Year riding a bicycle guided by an angelic figure, while the departing year (marked 1868) recedes into shadow. A cityscape with church spires anchors the background as cherubs scatter flowers across the street. This single-panel composition exemplifies nineteenth-century pictorial humor in the newspaper press, where symbolic characters and detailed engraving conveyed seasonal commentary. Homer's work bridges illustration and narrative—combining allegorical tradition with contemporary life (the bicycle as modern novelty) in a format that prefigured comics' visual storytelling methods, though predating the sequential panels that would define the medium's grammar by decade's end.