Column: Happy Thanksgiving from the High & Low!

In this tumultuous year, there is a whole lot to be grateful for. I’m pretty stoked about the stories I’ve gotten to cover — from architecture in South America to the culture scene in Tijuana to the indelible story of a 5,000-year-old tree whose memory was resurrected by a single-minded Los Angeles artist. And there are the countless conversations in between, with painters, authors, writers, filmmakers and so many others who make this town worth getting on a freeway in the morning.

In the spirit of the holiday, I leave you with this 19th century canvas by George Fuller (1822-1884), a painter known for his Romantic landscapes and gauzy portraits, some of which dealt with ethnicity and race. (One of his most famous pictures, “The Quadroon,” referring to a person of mixed race, is part of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.)

Fuller spent a good portion of his life managing his family’s farm in Massachusetts, which may have inspired the scene at top — created in the last year of his life. “Girl With Turkeys,” painted some time in 1883-84, was typical of many of his outdoors scenes, in which human figures recede hazily into a natural backdrop.

The canvas resides in the collection at the L.A. County Museum of Art. And it’s a pretty picture-perfect Thanksgiving scene.

Thank you so much for reading throughout the year. And thank you for supporting the L.A. Times. It means a lot.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!