Abbott Handerson Thayer

Margaret MacKittrick, about 1903

oil on canvas

23 ½ x 23 in.

Gift of the Friends of American Art

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Thayer was born in Boston and spent his boyhood in New Hampshire.  Here he learned to observe nature with scientific accuracy, laying the groundwork for his later theories of protective coloring, upon which the art of camouflage was developed in the First World War.  He studied painting first in Brooklyn, then at the National Academy of Design in New York, and later in the Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.  He is most widely known for his portraits of women and children, although animal and flower subjects, still life and landscape also interested him.

Thayer’s portrait of fifteen-year-old Margaret MacKittrick, a playmate of his children, is the embodiment of the natural beauty of young womanhood.  Her tousled hair, rough blouse and open gaze heighten the intriguing mixture of innocence and sensuousness in the refined, feminine contours of her face.  Thayer’s spontaneous, vigorous brushwork belies the fact that he probably worked intermittently on the painting for several years.  Thayer believed that after an initial three-day burst of inspiration, further direct work on a canvas would spoil it.  Any subsequent additions to his paintings were made only after they had been tested on replicas of the original work.  Thayer chose the elaborate Italian Renaissance-style frame to reinforce the timeless, ideal qualities of his subject. 

Reference

Ross Anderson. Abbott Handerson Thayer, Syracuse, New York: Everson Museum of Art, 1982. ISBN-13: 978-9993893059