page_title: Abbott Handerson Thayer
section_title: Artistic achievements
hierarchical_section_title: Abbott Handerson Thayer / Artistic achievements
context_page_description: Abbott Handerson Thayer was an American artist, naturalist and teacher. As a painter of portraits, figures, animals and landscapes, he enjoyed a certain prominence during his lifetime, and his paintings are represented in the major American art collections. He is perhaps best known for his 'angel' paintings, some of which use his children as models.
  During the last third of his life, he worked together with his son, Gerald Handerson Thayer, on a book about protective coloration in nature, titled Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. First published by Macmillan in 1909, then reissued in 1918, it may have had an effect on military camouflage during World War I. However it was roundly mocked by Theodore Roosevelt and others for its assumption that all animal coloration is cryptic.
  Thayer also influenced American art through his efforts as a teacher, training apprentices in his New Hampshire studio.
context_section_description: It is difficult to categorize Thayer simply as an artist. He was often described in first-person accounts as eccentric and mercurial, and there is a parallel contradictory mixture of academic tradition, spontaneity and improvisation in his artistic methods. For example, he is largely known as a painter of "ideal figures", in which he portrayed women as embodiments of virtue, adorned in flowing white tunics and equipped with feathered angel's wings. At the same time, he did this using methods that were surprisingly unorthodox, such as purposely mixing dirt into the paint, or (in one instance at least, according to Rockwell Kent) using a broom instead of a brush to lessen the sense of rigidity in a newly finished, still-wet painting.
  
  Thayer was largely surrounded by women, be they his family, housekeepers, models or students. Biographer Ross Anderson believed that in his mind "feminine virtue and aesthetic grandeur were inextricably linked"; Thayer felt that the press and even other artists contributed to the degradation of women by emphasizing their sexuality, rather than exalting their moral attributes. When he began to add wings to his figures in the late 1880s, he was making more obvious the transcendent qualities he saw in the female subject: 
  Doubtless my lifelong passion for birds has helped to incline me to work wings into my pictures; but primarily I have put on wings probably more to symbolize an exalted atmosphere (above the realm of genre painting) where one need not explain the action of the figures."
  Thayer's first use of the theme was the painting Angel. The wings were nailed into a board, in front of which his daughter Mary stood. The poignancy of Thayer's imagery was found wanting by art critic Clarence King, who suggested the use of buckets "to catch the dripping sentiment", yet other critics like Mariana Van Rensselaer were impressed by the serenity of Thayer's vision, and saw a "distinctly modern" approach in his traditional compositions.
  He survived with the help of his patrons, among them the industrialist Charles Lang Freer. Some of his finest works are in the collections of the Freer Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.
caption: The Sisters, 1884, oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum
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