Thanksgiving 1903

Louis M. Glackens's cover for Puck (No. 1395, priced at ten cents) stages a cozy Thanksgiving kitchen: a rosy-cheeked young woman in a polka-dot dress and white apron balances a pie plate aloft while four small children—seated in ladder-back chairs or clinging to one another—watch in delighted anticipation. A plucked turkey lies on the worktable beside a rolling pin and a jar; a giant pumpkin dominates the foreground floor. The scene carries no overt political argument; unlike much of Puck's satirical output, this holiday cover is purely celebratory, pitching an idealized Anglo-American domesticity to middle-class readers. The image reflects the era's sentimental magazine culture around Thanksgiving, which was then only forty years old as a federal holiday. Glackens renders the figures in the rounded, soft-outlined style typical of his commercial illustration work before his better-known career as an Ashcan painter.