Saturday Evening Post: Thanksgiving

Leyendecker painted this cover for The Saturday Evening Post at the height of his dominance of American magazine illustration, a period roughly spanning 1899 to the mid-1930s during which he produced more than three hundred Post covers and became the defining visual voice of prosperous American domesticity and aspiration. By 1912 he had already established the formal language that would make him the most recognized commercial artist in the country: the alla prima stroke, left standing and unblended, borrowing something from Munich academic training and something from the bold linearity of poster art. This Thanksgiving image belongs to a tradition of holiday covers he developed for the Post, several of which shaped the visual iconography of American seasonal celebration as durably as any fine-art painting of the era. Where his Arrow Collar campaigns fixed an ideal of masculine elegance, his domestic holiday covers fixed an ideal of American home life: orderly, warm, unsentimental, and observed with a draughtsman's precision. The cover was published under the banner of an illustrated weekly founded, as the masthead notes, by Benjamin Franklin, lending every image it carried a certain civic weight in the American cultural imagination.