Slideshow: Thayer

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1888–89
Oil on canvas
H x W: 76.3 x 51 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1890.4

Thayer’s lovely young neighbor, Clara Adelaide May (1872–1946), posed for this canvas that the artist simply called “Head.” The nonspecific title and classical drapery suggest Thayer may have drawn inspiration from ancient Roman portrait busts. An elaborate architectural frame designed by the renowned architect Stanford White (1853–1906) enhances the statuesque qualities of the model.

Frequently loaned by Freer to public exhibitions in the opening years of the twentieth century, Head was the first painting by Thayer that Freer acquired, and it is an early example of what would become his enduring interest in representations of idealized feminine beauty.

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1892–93
Oil on canvas
H x W: 229.7 x 182.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1893.11

In 1893, the same year Freer purchased A Virgin for the tremendous sum of $10,000, Thayer flattered his patron by comparing him to a Medici prince, whose generosity would enable the arts in America to “blossom and bear fruit.” In this way, Thayer also indirectly linked himself to the great artists of the Quattrocento (fifteenth century). This painting, which originally hung in an open stairwell in Freer’s home in Detroit, is almost over-burdened by art historical associations. The composition derives from Renaissance altarpieces, while the striding central figure—the Virgin of the title—was inspired by the famous Winged Victory, the Nike of Samothrace, which Thayer had seen at the Louvre during his student years in Paris.

More immediate, intimate sources of inspiration, most notably the artist’s three children, lighten these weighty allusions. Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer endured numerous sessions posing for their father in the years following their mother’s untimely death in 1891. Over the years Freer acquired several more images of the children. Thayer regarded these paintings as being among his most inspired works.

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, ca. 1900
Oil on canvas
H x W: 77.1 x 58.8 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1910.1

Thayer established his earliest professional success in the 1880s as a painter of society portraits. Following the untimely death of his first wife in 1891, however, he began rejecting portrait commissions, frustrated “by the strain to suit the relatives on the one hand and the muse on the other.” In this painting, possibly one of his last society portraits, the features of the sitter are individualized, but the title suggests a generic type similar to the “American girl” immortalized by the novelist Henry James (1843–1916). Thayer’s painted portrait combines realism with great attention to the surface qualities of the paint itself. Thayer admired the bravura brushwork of his contemporary, the expatriate artist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), whose influence is seen in the bold highlights on the figure’s face and in the broad strokes used to depict her dress, where blue shadows echo the deep blue of the background. Thayer considered his skill in manipulating white pigments as one of his particular talents. When this work was exhibited in 1910 at the Montross Gallery in New York City, the art critic Royal Cortissoz praised “the sensuous charm of the sitter’s white drapery and the blue background against which it is set.”

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1901
Oil on canvas
H x W: 90.5 x 115.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.47

This view of the southern Italian island of Capri at dawn was begun in the winter of 1901, when Thayer spent several months there studying and sketching Mediterranean seagulls. He composed the painting from his hotel window, characterizing it as “a fairly true portrait,” a “study” of color and light rather than an “idealization.” Although he professed to dislike Capri’s holiday atmosphere, Thayer nevertheless was struck by its natural beauty. He explained that the painting was “born of the loveliness of the scene.”

The painting was unfinished when Thayer left the island with his children in February. Throughout the following months he continued to modify it in his studio in Dublin, New Hampshire, working from a photograph and at least two other painted replicas. As Thayer explained, he was “tuning” the work to achieve “pure naturalistic color notes” that reminded him of the palette of the French impressionist painter Claude Monet. Freer, who had recently purchased a villa on Capri, acquired this landscape—his first by Thayer—sight unseen.

 

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1904
Oil on canvas
H x W: 90.5 x 90.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.359

A naturalist as well as an artist, Thayer spent much of his life in the shadow of Mount Monadnock, hiking its trails, studying its flora and fauna, and protecting its pristine beauty. The mountain had been an important symbol to such Transcendenalist writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862). Thayer shared their pantheistic reverence toward nature, particularly the belief that the natural world was a concrete manifestation of invisible spiritual facts. “This dear mountain,” as Thayer described Monadnock, was also an abiding source of artistic inspiration and personal solace. He fed his soul by “gazing at the mountain from afar.” He painted its snow-capped peak many times, returning “again and again [to] the same theme,” in hopes of each time “raising the standard.”
           
Of the four images of Monadnock that Freer ultimately acquired (three large oils and a small watercolor), Monadnock in Winter is the most realistic. Nonetheless, Thayer described it as possessing an almost visionary quality. In writing to Freer of his efforts to perfect the color values of the trees and snow, he noted that he strove to make it “something very like what I dreamt of.” The scene is devoid of human presence. A solitary pine tree acts as a surrogate for the artist/viewer completely immersed in the landscape.

 

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1912
Oil on canvas
H x W: 90.2 x 90.2 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1913.93

Eight years after completing Monadnock in Winter in 1904, Thayer wrote to Freer of a new version that was similar in size and composition to the earlier example but characterized by “up-to-date perceptions” of the winter dawn. Unlike the laborious process of scraping and repainting that Thayer undertook to bring the 1904 canvas to completion, this image of Monadnock was painted rapidly, “done at white heat last winter,” according to the artist. White impasto (thickly applied paint) and calligraphic strokes of black disrupt the realism of the scene. Scholars have compared Monadnock No. 2 to certain Chinese ink paintings in the Freer collection.

 

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1918
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 113.8 x 167 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1919.1

After he acquired Thayer’s 1904 and 1912 paintings of Monadnock Mountain, Freer expressed great pleasure with the “different renderings of that superb subject,” and he resolved that they should always be exhibited together. In 1919 Freer added a third and final example in oil to the series. Winter Dawn on Monadnock is a larger, more panoramic view of the mountain than the two earlier works, though the angular, calligraphic strokes of the foreground pull the viewer back to the surface of the canvas, creating a subtle tension between the illusion of spatial recession and the flatness of the picture plane. Although he was already planning to install a gallery dedicated to Thayer’s work in his museum in Washington, Freer first hung the painting in his home in Detroit, where it was flanked by the earlier canvases. The grouping of the three views, he explained in a letter to Thayer’s second wife, Emma, “radiated a rarely powerful and beautiful force—which I am sure would have delighted both yourself and Mr. Thayer had you been present.”

 

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1904–11
Oil on canvas
H x W: 229 x 151.7 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.59

Thayer characterized the long and sometimes painful gestation of A Winged Figure as a type of pregnancy, and he promised Freer that it would ultimately become “one of my real contributions to humanity.” He also warned Freer that its price would be high: $6,500.

In March of 1906 he exhibited the work at the annual exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York City, but he continued to work on it for another six years. As was his habit, Thayer tried out changes on a duplicate canvas. He was striving, he told Freer, to capture and embody “a look in Gladys”—the sitter, his youngest child—of which “wings are the normal symbol.” In the process of refining the painting, Thayer included a wreath of gilded leaves encircling his daughter’s head. Freer was uncertain about this addition, but he agreed to accept the painting.

When Freer first saw A Winged Figure in progress in 1905, he commissioned architect Stanford White to design a frame for it. The frame, however, was not completed in time for the 1906 exhibition. Thayer was forced to display the painting in this elaborate antique frame that he borrowed from White’s personal collection of Renaissance artifacts. That summer, White was fatally shot in Madison Square Garden. The new frame remained unfinished. Freer purchased this one, which Thayer decided he preferred, from White’s estate.

 

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
United States, 1903/1916
Oil on canvas
H x W: 213.5 x 153 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1915.67

Winged Figure Seated upon a Rock originated as one of the canvases related to the Stevenson Memorial of 1903 (and now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum), a tribute to one of Thayer’s favorite authors, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). This iteration of the composition, which occupied Thayer off and on for more than a decade, was described by the artist as “My heart’s legacy to the world.” Thayer dedicated it to Kate Bloede (1846–1891), his first wife and the mother of his three children. She died of tuberculosis after she had been institutionalized for mental illness in 1889. The model for the winged figure is Gladys (1886­–1945), Thayer’s youngest child. He inscribed the lower edge of the canvas with the Latin phrase “O MATER FILIAE MEAE! TIBI HOC MONUMENTUM” [Oh mother of my daughter, this is a monument to you].

This work remained in the artist’s studio for years. Thayer seems to have found it difficult to complete the painting to his liking. The figure’s awkwardly placed right leg and the heavily worked surface of the canvas testify to his efforts. He ultimately declared it satisfactory, inscribing on the lower edge of the canvas a warning to future generations that “This picture is never to be retouched—not one pinpoint.” Thayer valued the composition’s personal associations and confided to Freer that it “greatly comforted me and the family” when they viewed it together in 1908.