James Thurber’s fourth New Yorker cover (out of the six he did for the magazine) is perhaps my favorite New Yorker 4th of July cover of all time. That’s saying a lot, I know, considering the wealth of covers that preceded it and followed it.
I’m not one for dissecting or deconstructing art, so I won’t go any further here than allowing that Thurber gathered many of his now classic characters on this particular cover: the little girl with the ribbon in her hair, the harried husband, the somewhat menacing wife, and of course, the Thurber dog. Only one other New Yorker cartoonist has drawn a dog that came to be identified by its association with the artist and that cartoonist is George Booth (yesterday’s subject on Ink Spill). Everyone who has followed the New Yorker knows immediately what a “Booth dog” looks like. If you began reading the magazine well previous to Mr. Booth’s New Yorker association you’d certainly know a “Thurber dog” when you saw one.
Aside from the fact that this piece is Thurber art, the other reason I love this cover, published seventy-five Fourth of Julys ago, is that we don’t need to do a Google search or run to Wikipedia to identify who these people are or what they’re doing. On Independence Day 2016 we know exactly who these people are, and we know exactly what they were up to on their front yard on Independence Day 1941.