Classic Cartoons: Martin Plimmer on Peter Arno

PETER ARNO was a playboy cartoonist in an era when women were admired, adored and dreaded, but never knowingly understood - as in "Wifely Laughter", right.

For 43 years, from 1925, Arno's New Yorker watercolours recorded, with enormous brio, the wonderment and bafflement men felt towards the fairer sex (remember when women were the fairer sex?). To modern men, encumbered by the stress of having to understand, Arno's passionately uncompromising brushstrokes and unembarrassed enjoyment of casting-couches, striptease joints, mink coats and all their heavenly associations seem at once quaint and euphoric.

His wit, never mean or petty, was as sharp as his noses. He died in 1968 and his gravestone in Valhalla, New York, is enlivened by his signature.