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Abbott Handerson Thayer

Boston, 1849 - 1921, Dublin, New Hampshire

BiographyLC Name Authority record: n82151062
LC Heading: Thayer, Abbott Handerson, 1849-1921

American painter and naturalist, 1849-1921

Thayer, Abbott Handerson (12 Aug. 1849-29 May 1921), painter and naturalist, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of William Henry Thayer, a physician, and Ellen Handerson. Raised in rural New Hampshire, Thayer was passionately interested in the out-of-doors; he was particularly attentive to wildfowl and became an avid trapper and hunter. His earliest artistic efforts were watercolors of birds and other animals.

While attending Chauncy Hall School in Boston, Thayer met the jeweler and amateur animal painter Henry Morse, who offered encouragement and suggested that he work in oils. After some success painting portraits of household pets, he decided to embark on a career as a painter. He attended classes at the Brooklyn Art School in 1867 but a year later switched to the National Academy of Design, where he studied for the next several years. He was remembered there as a good but not extraordinary student who had little patience for drawing antique casts but who did well in life class. An avid talker and theorizer, he frequently brought in sketches and affixed them to the studio walls, hoping to win praise from his classmates.

In 1875 Thayer married Kate Bloede, the daughter of a German journalist; they had three children who survived to adulthood. A week after their marriage the couple sailed for France, where, like many of his fellow artists, Thayer sought training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He first attended classes at the atelier of Henri Lehmann but then gained entry to the class of Jean Léon Gérôme, perhaps the most highly regarded painter in Europe. Although Thayer's loose, sketchlike style was quite unlike Gérôme's precise draftsmanship, Gérôme recognized Thayer's talent. "Always, good," he told his young student, "but woolly!"

Thayer remained four years in France, attending class in Paris and spending summers in outlying areas. Upon his return to America in 1879 he began to receive commissions at once, including a portrait of Mark Twain that was engraved for Scribner's Magazine (American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York), and he did family portraits as well.

Throughout the 1880s Thayer and his family moved almost seasonally, spending the winter months in small towns along the Hudson River such as Peekskill, Cornwall, and Scarborough--with Thayer maintaining a studio in New York--while summers were spent in various New England towns. Thayer remained busy doing portraits, and he exhibited regularly at both the National Academy of Design and the more progressive Society of American Artists, where he was vice president and president, respectively, in 1883 and 1884. He became widely admired for his ability to capture a woman's likeness while simultaneously endowing her with qualities of ideality and ennoblement that he found central to the female character.

Generally speaking, the women he painted were young and well-formed, but simply dressed and never stylish nor overtly sexy, in contrast to the society portrait typical of the day. Moreover, they seemed absolutely incapable of an unseemly thought or action. For Thayer, the only possible subjects for art were those that inherently reflected moral values. "For men," he wrote, "the dawn, the day, girls, mothers and children, and brave kind men, all these things in their most familiar form are more ravishing every day come over again, through all time by virtue of the ever-deepening layers of heavenly connotations which they accumulate." Portrait of Miss Bessie Stillman (1883, private collection?) rates among the finest of the early portraits; Young Woman (1898, Metropolitan Museum of Art), in actuality a portrait of household servant Bessie Price, finds the artist in his later, more generalizing mode.

Thayer's pursuit of ideality was not attained without a struggle. An exceedingly skilled draftsman, he could get a charming and accurate visage on canvas within a few days, but for weeks and even months thereafter he would repeatedly alter it, never satisfied with the result. In the course of this practice, effacings and readjustments would often remain visible on the finished picture's surface; to those unfamiliar with the artist's method they might appear as blunders. But for Thayer there was undoubtedly a pleasing earnestness to these markings; they prevented the portrait from becoming slick and the artist from appearing too cavalier in addressing his illustrious subject.

Thayer's spiritual concerns became more evident in his work in the late 1880s, when he began to paint the subjects with which he became most closely identified: idealized female figures in classical robes, often referred to as "virgins" and frequently sporting large white wings, such as in the frequently reproduced Angel (c. 1888, National Museum of American Art), for which his eldest daughter Mary posed. He also executed monumental compositions featuring his own children and others in allegorical dress, in hieratic poses reminiscent of Renaissance altarpieces. Virgin Enthroned (1891, National Museum of American Art) finds Mary again in a role suggestive of the Holy Virgin, with son Gerald and daughter Gladys filling in for John the Baptist and Jesus, respectively. This shift in theme coincided with the mental breakdown and institutionalization of his wife in 1888 and her death from "melancholia" in 1891. The same year he married Emma Beach, a former art student and old family friend who for over a decade had acted as domestic manager and personal adviser to the Thayers.

Always extremely close to his family, Thayer relied on them for his own emotional stability and even his sense of self-worth, for in spite of great success he found the mildest criticism discomfiting and required the unconditional adulation that only members of his own household could provide. None of his children were ever enrolled in school, nor were they long out of the family circle, so they absorbed only their father's interests in life. Perhaps Thayer also found self-affirmation in the several portraits he painted of himself throughout his career, ranging from the earnest young intellectual of 1897 (private collection?) to the stern but noble old codger of 1919 (Corcoran Gallery of Art).

In 1901 Thayer moved his family permanently to Dublin, New Hampshire, where they lived in a modest cottage built for them thirteen years earlier by a wealthy student of Thayer's. Despite the freezing weather, Thayer made no attempt to winterize the structure, and even in the coldest months the Thayers slept outdoors in individual lean-tos that they erected on the property surrounding the house.

Although Thayer had intermittently executed landscapes earlier in his career, in Dublin this interest intensified. In his approach to the subject, Thayer was much influenced by his favorite author, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote that natural beauty was the physical expression of a spiritual power lying beyond the material, giving it order and meaning. In 1904 Thayer completed the first of several landscapes inspired by the sight that greeted him as he looked south from his property: a breathtaking view of Mount Monadnock rising calmly but majestically from the undulating terrain. Housed in the Freer Gallery of Art, its beauty is somewhat upstaged by a more Orientalizing version completed in 1912, Monadnock #2, also at the Freer.

The significance of the peak in Thayer's life cannot be overestimated. As his student Barry Faulkner wrote, "Thayer shaped his life and the life of his family on Monadnock. It was their totem, their fetish, the object of their adoration. They surrendered themselves to the sorcery of its primitive being. Gerald [Thayer's son] and his father prowled its peaks and precipices, its naked spine, and knew well the mysteries of the mountain brook and its groves of spruce and hemlock." For Thayer, Monadnock was a terrestrial embodiment of the infinite, a symbol of the upward striving of man toward wisdom and spiritual strength. In meaning parallel to his virgin-angels, Monadnock functioned both as a visual synecdoche of earthly experience (at least in its attractive aspects) and as an emblem of earthly transcendence. While providing him with the physical pleasures of nature, it guided him to spiritual heights beyond natural beauty. Not surprisingly, he drew inspiration again from Emerson, who in 1845 wrote a long poem devoted to the same peak.

While in Dublin, Thayer believed he found a solution to his exceedingly slow and mind-changing method of painting a picture. When he reached a tentatively satisfying point in his travails, he ordered his assistants--who at one time included Rockwell Kent--to make copies of his work. In this way he could keep a record of each painting should later additions prove unsatisfactory; he could also experiment on copies before transferring his modifications to the original. In practice, however, the copies lost their status as preparatory studies to become alternative versions of the original works.

Thayer's passion for nature led him to a second career as a naturalist. In the 1890s Thayer and Gerald began to collect bird specimens, which would be stuffed, cataloged, and stored in an upstairs room in Dublin. Most were found in the New England countryside, but they also took trips to Florida and Sardinia in pursuit of more exotic breeds. It was through his intense examination of birds that Thayer constructed his theories of protective coloration, first published in 1896 in the Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists Union. He stated that animals tend to be colored darkest on those parts of their bodies that are most exposed to the sun's light, and colored lightest on the parts of their bodies that are mostly in shadow. Such a phenomenon, according to Thayer, often rendered the animal invisible, for when the light hits the dark parts and the shadow hits the light parts of the body, the tones tend to cancel each other out. In addition to this "countershading," he also observed in the coats of many animals the employment of strong patterns of color, which tended to conceal them by destroying their continuity of surface and thus obscuring their shape. This he termed "ruptive" coloration. These observations and related studies culminated in 1909 in the publication Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, nominally written by Gerald but in actuality a collaborative work in which the elder partner was the controlling sensibility.

The precepts set forth in that volume did not go unchallenged in the scientific community. Thayer's detractors saw merit in the artist's basic points, particularly when applied to small woodland birds and mammals, but when he insisted flamingoes and giraffes were protectively colored, they felt he had gone beyond common sense. They commented that such animals normally were very conspicuous in their habitats, and that if almost any animal stood still in a dense forest, it would be difficult to see.

But while Thayer's theories were never endorsed fully, his efforts did much to bring the subject of camouflage to the attention of the public. He tried to convince the Allied forces during World War I of the military utility of camouflage, but it was not until after his death during World War II that some of his theories were put into use. He died in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Bibliography

Thayer's papers are deposited in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Also useful is his father's journal, published as The William Henry Thayer Journal (1972). Several accounts of Thayer's life, particularly in Dublin, have been incorporated in published reminiscences, including Cecilia Beaux, Background with Figures (1930), Nancy Bowditch, George de Forest Brush (1970), Barry Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist's Life (1973), and Rockwell Kent, It's Me, O Lord: The Autobiography of Rockwell Kent (1955). Biographical studies include Ross Anderson, Abbott Handerson Thayer (1982, contained within the museum catalog published by the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, N.Y.), and Nelson C. White, Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist (1951).

Ross Anderson

Online Resources

Abbott Handerson Thayer
http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/collections/exhibits/thayer/index.html
An online exhibit from the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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Citation:
Ross Anderson. "Thayer, Abbott Handerson";
http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00854.html;
American National Biography Online Feb. 2000.
Access Date: Tue Aug 06 2013 11:31:19 GMT-0400 (Eastern Standard Time)
Copyright © 2000 American Council of Learned Societies.

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Last Updated8/7/24

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