We hear of a "golden Age" of urban cycling in the decade or two prior to the automobile age. Are there any well known paintings or photographs showing streets full of happy, dapper looking cyclists?

by Count_Spockula
printculture

There are numerous Victorian photographs of cyclists and cycle clubs.

Jean Beraud's The Cycle Hut at the Bois de Boulogne, ca 1900, is an Impressionist painting that gives a sense of cycling as a fashionable pastime for French men and women at the turn of the 20th century. Most Impressionist street scenes that give a sense of the crowd are dominated by carriages, with which bicycles shared the road. There are many paintings of individual cyclists, for example Manet's unfinished painting of his stepson Léon on a velocipede; and the subject was a favourite of the Futurists, who were contemporaneous with Henry Ford's production line.

You can go farther back than this, though. The forerunner of the bicycle, called the velocipede or pedestrian hobbyhorse, emerged in the 1810s, started a craze, became associated with dandyism, and was rapidly caricatured in the work of Robert Cruickshank, 1819; and others ; another example ; yet another