Father Time and the New Year Baby

Joseph Leyendecker brought the concept of the New Year’s Baby to the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in celebration of the arrival of 1907. The annual, much-anticipated cover was a long-standing series for the publication, with Leyendecker creating more than thirty of them over his career. In this work made for 1911, Father Time makes his first appearance, greeting the New Year’s Baby who brings him up to date with a copy of the Post. Later covers would highlight current events with references to the suffrage movement, the stock market, and World War I. In his final New Year’s Baby cover, made for 1943, a helmeted cherub slices through a swastika with a bayonet.