Tuesday, November 26, 2019

A Parrish Thanksgiving

Collier's cover showing homeless man with can of beans looking skyward with a smile
When Collier's needed a good holiday cover, they knew who to turn to: Maxfield Parrish. In the early 1900s Collier's was becoming the most popular of the muckraking magazines. It was required reading for millions of Americans. Along with several other prominent painters and illustrators, Parrish was a regular contributor for major holiday issues. Parrish's cover art, sometimes melancholy, usually sentimental, and ever hopeful, helped to set the mood the magazine was after. We have proofs from many of these in our Maxfield Parrish collection. Here are three covers devoted to the Thanksgiving issue. They evoke a quintessential American holiday.

Incidentally, the editor of Collier's at the time was Norman Hapgood who would later marry Elizabeth Reynolds. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood became Dartmouth's first woman faculty member in 1918!
Collier's cover showing a man and his child walking through the snow with bags of foodCollier's cover showing cartoon of pilgrim with a gun and a turkey
 To see them, ask for ML-62, Box 12.

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