Charles Dana Gibson, "The Turning of the Tide" (1900)

Gibson's caption delivers the joke before the eye does: a well-dressed courting couple—man in suit and bow tie, woman in an Edwardian shirtwaist—sit kissing on a rock as the tide has quietly risen around them. Their straw boater hats float abandoned in the foreground water, the only evidence that decorum once prevailed. The humor is purely situational and classless for Life's standards: romantic absorption defeats social propriety. Gibson draws the woman with his characteristic 'Gibson Girl' confidence—upswept hair, straight back—while the landscape recedes in fine cross-hatched shoreline. No ethnic caricature is present. The political argument, such as it is, gently mocks genteel courtship conventions: nature, not manners, governs the young.