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Happy Turkey Day!
Today’s theme show is brought to you by Dutch Art Nouveau lithographer and illustrator Theo van Hoytema. He was born in The Hague in 1863, the son of the Secretary-General of the Ministry of Finance. His attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps went no further than a brief job at his brothers’ bank. Art was his true vocation, particularly drawings of animals. His first paid work as an artist were illustrations in scientific volumes.
Plants and animals, particularly birds, remained his favorite subjects, even when he branched out into non-fiction. In 1892, he published his first lithographed booklet, How the Birds Got a King, and achieved notable success with his 1893 follow-up, an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling.
He earned his greatest fame with a series of lithograph calendars published every year from 1902 until 1918, the last of them published posthumously. Birds were again his main subjects, although other wildlife made it into the monthly illustrations too. Among the owls, cranes, peacocks and gulls in the van Hoytema oeuvre are several rather spectacular turkeys. They were originally imports to Europe, of course, but by the time Theo van Hoytema was capturing them in all their glory, turkeys had been staples of European husbandry for 400 years.
The New World native birds had first made landfall in Spain in 1511. These were turkeys domesticated by the Zapotecs a thousand years before, not the wild turkeys of New England, so they were much meatier and flightless. They were easy to raise, cheap to feed and could even be driven to market in flocks of hundreds. They were so well-established that by the end of the decade, domesticated European turkeys were being shipped back to the Americas with colonists as a source of reliable farmed protein.
Less than a decade after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, they were importing turkeys from England to establish flocks in the new colony. The actual first Thanksgiving in 1621 featured water fowl, hunted by the colonists, as the main dish, venison brought by the Wampanoag, plus seafood and possibly some local wild turkeys. But the kind of turkeys found on the modern Thanksgiving table are the products of Mexican turkeys bred for eight decades in different countries in Europe then returning to the Eastern seaboard where they made sweet love with the local wild populations to create the various American breeds of turkey that are now in every grocery store.
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