Today’s theme show is brought to you by Dutch Art Nouveau lithographer and illustrator Theo van Hoetema. 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 was nothing more than a brief stint at his brothers’ bank. Art was his main offering, especially animal drawings. His first paid work as an artist was illustrations in scientific volumes.
Plants and animals, especially birds, remained his favorite subjects, even when he wrote non-fiction. In 1892, he published his first lithographed booklet, How did the birds get a king?and achieved notable success with its 1893 follow-up, An Illustrated Edition of Hans Christian Andersen. The ugly duckling.
He achieved his greatest fame with a series of lithograph calendars published annually from 1902 to 1918, the last of which he published later. Birds were again his main subjects, although other wildlife also made it into the monthly illustrations. Among the Van Hoetima oeuvre are owls, cranes, peacocks and gulls, and many rather amazing turkeys. Of course they were originally imported into Europe, but by the time Theo van Hoetima was capturing them in all their glory, turkeys had been the mainstay of European pets for over 400 years.
Birds native to the New World first landed in Spain in 1511. These turkeys were domesticated thousands of years ago by the Zapotecs, not the wild turkeys of New England, so they were more cheerful and flighty. They were easy to raise, cheap to feed and could even be marketed in flocks of hundreds. They were so good that by the end of the decade, domesticated European turkeys were being shipped back to America with colonies of reliable farmed protein.
Less than a decade after making the pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock, they were importing turkeys from England to establish flocks in the new colony. The original first Thanksgiving in 1621 featured waterfowl, hunted by the colonists, as the main dish, seafood brought by the Wampanoag, plus seafood and possibly some local wild fowl. But the turkeys found on the modern Thanksgiving table are the product of Mexican turkeys that were bred for eight decades in various European countries then returned to the Eastern Seaboard, where they made sweet love with local wild populations to create the various American breeds of turkey that are now in every grocery store.
