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Abbott Handerson Tayer

Still Life, about 1886

oil on canvas

14 ½ x 17 ½ in.

Gift of the Gamboliers

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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 preoccupation with painting images of women was occasionally interrupted by excursions into landscape and still-life subjects.  This sparse but dramatic composition of a peony in a pewter-lined copper bowl was probably inspired by the work of American painter and designer John La Farge, whose floral still-life paintings were widely admired during the 1860s and 1870s.  Like La Farge, Thayer emphasized dramatic lighting effects and contrasting textures, such as the soft petals and the hard surface of the bowl.  The casual, uncontrived arrangement of the composition also recalls La Farge.  Thayer depicts the lavish bloom of the peony, a late nineteenth-century favorite, as an almost vaporous confection of cool pinks pulled together by several decisive strokes of the brush.  The blossom’s natural appearance is similar in theme to Thayer’s paintings of the unaffected beauty of young women. 

Reference

Nelson C. White.  Abbott Handerson Thayer: Painter and Naturalist, Connecticut Printers, 1951 ASIN: B0007EJV4A.