Another Year by the Old Clock

This wood engraving by Winslow Homer depicts two figures watching a grandfather clock strike midnight on New Year's Eve. A bearded man in formal dress sits with a woman in an interior domestic scene, their attention fixed on the timepiece as it marks the passage from one year to the next. Homer's composition uses cross-hatching and fine linear detail characteristic of period newspaper illustration. The work exemplifies 19th-century graphic storytelling that preceded the sequential comic strip format, employing a single scene to convey narrative moment and human emotion. Published in *Harper's Weekly*, such illustrations established visual conventions—intimate framing, character expression, and symbolic objects—that would later define comic art.