Raised in the small town of Aledo in rural western Illinois, Doris Lee studied art in Italy and France before returning to the United States, eventually settling in Woodstock, New York. She adopted a deliberately naive style for her 1935 painting Thanksgiving, which was initially controversial. Lee’s seemingly untaught aesthetic put her in the vanguard of American modernism. The subsequent lithograph, shown here, was marketed for five dollars to middle-class purchasers; it became, and remains, an iconic image of the American holiday.