At Sea Without Peter Arno

I was going to leave it at that. Surely no one could mistake the eBay cartoon for the work of Peter Arno, whatever the signature. No one could really think a color cartoon from this era could have appeared in the New Yorker. Then the bidding jumped from $46 to $112.50. Perhaps I should say something...

The cartoon art on eBay is a color cartoon that was evidently published in a men's magazine. The original artwork in question shows a boat enthusiast with a young, overdeveloped woman visiting on board his sailboat. He has surreptitiously cut loose the rowboat and pretends to be alarmed. "Oh, dear!! The dinghy's loose and you can't swim!!"The implication, I suppose, is that she has no choice but to remain stranded on the sailboat with him. Is this coercive scheme meant to pass for clever?

Now let's look at a real Peter Arno cartoon, one with a similar maritime theme, that was published in the New Yorker in 1951. Now I always thought Westover was the name of the savvy boater with the mustache, but apparently it is an elite girls' school. The "know-how," it seems, can run either way.