Crowd scenes gave illustrators a chance to do something portraiture and landscape couldn't: show how people behave when they think no one is watching. The subject runs through American satirical magazines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where weekly publications built their reputations on sharp social observation, and it carried forward into mid-century magazine covers that treated the crowd as comedy, spectacle, and occasionally indictment. The period originals here come from that tradition.