Richard Lippincott Denison Taylor

With their distinctive pointed noses, Richard Taylor’s cartoon figures satirized numerous aspects of American society in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Playboy, and most often, The New Yorker. This image presents a humorous collision between stereotypes of the slow and labor-intensive practice of stone-carving and the speed and accessibility of photography as a rival form of image-making. Before achieving fame as a cartoonist, Taylor studied at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, where his training included life-drawing classes.

Richard Taylor began contributing to The New Yorker in 1935. His body of work frequently addressed the art world, its idiosyncrasies, its influence on pop culture, and the social and sexual innuendos that art and its viewing could embody. In this cartoon, which appeared with the caption, “Smile,” Taylor compares the dissonant art forms of sculpture, with its time-consuming manual labor, and photography, with its instant exposure, to poke fun at the ironic, modern relationship between artist and model.