The Horseless Carriage

Emlen McConnell, an American illustrator and artist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and lived in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and was a student at Howard Pyle’s Summer School. Much of McConnell’s work was for Curtis publications and he was a frequent illustrator for “The Saturday Evening Post” where his work appeared on five of its covers. After 1925 McConnell ceased his illustration work and took up landscape painting and teaching. Times are changing and the automobile is replacing the traditional horse and carriage. The early automobile with a tiller is driving past a far slower horse drawn carriage and in the backdrop another horse is idly watching the traffic pass by whilst it’s carriage is left abandoned and worse for wear alongside the road. Upon closer observation we see that the lady is in fact driving the automobile and not the gentleman sitting next to her. The arrival of the automobile not only brought gentleman a new found freedom but definitely also gentlewomen.