Wild Turkey, from the Game Birds series (N40) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1888 - 1890

Curator: This chromolithograph, titled "Wild Turkey," is from Allen & Ginter's "Game Birds" series, dating to between 1888 and 1890. It's quite small, originally part of a cigarette pack insert. What catches your eye first? Editor: The whole thing has a faintly unsettling, taxidermied quality to it. Something about the bird's stance feels stiff and the colours, though rich, lack a certain vitality. Almost like it's a scene recalled imperfectly. Curator: That stillness might come from the pictorialist style, but there's a tension, I think, between its artificiality and its ambition to represent nature accurately. Allen & Ginter sought to associate their product with this outdoorsy ideal of American masculinity. Editor: True, and note the divided composition. We have a domestic hearth with smoking implements oddly juxtaposed with an image of wild turkeys, framed in an orientalizing fashion. It reads as a pastiche more than anything authentic. Is it me or do those baby turkeys look like they’re about to tumble right out of the painted frame? Curator: It's a bit of a visual puzzle, isn't it? The drawing makes it look as though those turkeys are suspended in mid-air. The image hints at themes of home, the hunt, and the "natural" world. And then you're jolted back to reality by the company name as if in advert mode with the inscription 'Richmond Straight Cut No 1 Cigarettes are the Best'. Editor: That inscription, squeezed into the upper right, shatters any illusion. There's something fundamentally uneasy about the commercial deployment of natural imagery, especially in this context where ideas of masculinity, freedom, and unspoiled wilderness are subtly packaged with a tobacco product. Curator: Yet, I'm drawn to the tension. The visual disjunction invites closer looking and questioning those very associations. Editor: It leaves you slightly itchy with conflicting sentiments, doesn’t it? Well, one thing it undeniably achieves, is making the viewer reach for a cigarette. A cunningly deceptive ploy for which it wins first prize in the “Most Ironic Artwork” category. Curator: And it provokes discussions still, centuries later, about art, advertising, and our relationship with the environment. It seems a little picture can reveal a great deal. Editor: Absolutely! Its modest format cleverly reveals, just how completely, everything is interwoven.