Peter Arno. The Mad, Mad world of the New Yorker's greatest

The New Yorker's original one-man art department, Rea Irvin, famously designed Eustace Tilley, the magazine's monocled mascot. A foppish aristocratic dandy with a nose turned up in sniffy dismissal while scrutinizing a butterfly, Tilley became the ironic icon of Harold Ross's fledgling weekly and would survive unto the generations in a variety of guises. In addition to the fictional Tilley, however, Harold Ross soon had a real-life dandy in his stable. Beginning with his first New Yorker drawing in the magazine's eighteenth issue (dated June 20, 1925), Peter Arno would manifest Ross's ideal of a magazine that would celebrate the new postwar freedoms of the Jazz Age while gently mocking upper-class pretensions. In Arno, he found an artist who embodied both guises – artist and aristocrat – in one brilliant, handsome, and self-contradictory package.