Double Feature
Today we celebrate two historical events, the 1858 patent of the pencil with an eraser top and the U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917!
This pencil sketch by Abbott Handerson Thayer salutes the pencil-eraser patent. Thayer is recognized today for his ethereal angels, portraits of women and children, landscapes, and delicate flower paintings. A New Englander who expressed the spiritual in much of his work, he was known as a "soul painter." In his own time, his work was praised by critics even as it was popular with the public and sought after by collectors.
Mitchell Jamieson painted the watercolor below, Boatbuilder's Houses, St. Johns, about twenty years after the United States bought the Virgin Islands.
Source: Abbott Handerson Thayer (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, 1999) at http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/thayer/index.html.
Pictured top: Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849–1921, Study of a Young Woman, about 1895, pencil on paperboard, 13 1/4 x 10 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Musuem, Gift of John Gellatly.
Pictured bottom: Mitchell Jamieson, 1915–1976, Boatbuilder's Houses, St. Johns, about 1936, watercolor and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the General Services Administration.
Today we celebrate two historical events, the 1858 patent of the pencil with an eraser top and the U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917!
This pencil sketch by Abbott Handerson Thayer salutes the pencil-eraser patent. Thayer is recognized today for his ethereal angels, portraits of women and children, landscapes, and delicate flower paintings. A New Englander who expressed the spiritual in much of his work, he was known as a "soul painter." In his own time, his work was praised by critics even as it was popular with the public and sought after by collectors.