Thanksgiving

This cover appeared on the Saturday Evening Post dated November 13, 1909, the week before Thanksgiving, and belongs to the long creative partnership between Leyendecker and the magazine's art director that would eventually produce more than 320 covers. By 1909 Leyendecker had already established himself as the dominant voice in American magazine illustration, his American Realism inflected by the Academic finish he absorbed during his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris in the late 1890s. The Thanksgiving baby-chef is among the earliest of his recurring holiday characters, preceding the Arrow Collar Man and the New Year's Baby that would become national icons in later decades. The image carries the visual shorthand Leyendecker perfected: a single figure isolated in a vignette, the face and hands doing all the narrative work, the background reduced to atmosphere. Covers such as this one helped define what an American holiday looked like for a readership of several million, cementing the Post's place as the country's most influential popular illustrated weekly.