Thanksgiving: Simple Appreciation for Our Blessings
Categories: Art History, family, food, Holidays, illustration, painting, portrait
“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt, from speech to Congress, 1941
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want” appeared on the pages of The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943.
William Formsby Halsall’s “The Mayflower on Her Arrival in Plymouth Harbor” shows the ship at dawn after her landing in Plymouth Harbor, and is portrayed as a symbol of the beginning of a new era. The vessel left England in September 1620 and after a grueling 66-day journey marked by disease, which claimed two lives, the ship dropped anchor inside the hook tip of Cape Cod in November .
“Embarkation of the Pilgrims”by Edgar Parker after Robert Weir. In 1836, the United States government commissioned Robert W. Weir to paint “The Picture of the Embarkation of the Pilgrims from Delfthaven in Holland “for filling the vacant panels in the rotunda of the Capital” in Washington, D.C. It was one of several large scale paintings chosen to represent significant historical moments leading to the founding of the American Republic. Completed in 1843, it depicts the Pilgrim families gathered around their pastor, John Robinson, for a farewell service on the deck of the Speedwell before its departure from Holland.
Elysian Studios wishes everyone
a Happy Thanksgiving!
