Enjoy This Selection from the Museum's Peter A. Juley and Son Collection
Abbott Handerson Thayer is best known for his idealistic and allegorical paintings of women as angels and madonnas.Thayer's interest in color and nature led to his writing Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), the basis for camouflage techniques in World War I.
Thayer's children—Mary pictured below in the center, Gerald and Gladys at her sides—served as models for this reinterpretation of a Renaissance Madonna, titled Virgin Enthroned. It is currently on view with several other Thayer paintings in our traveling exhibition The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee through August 27, 2000.
Pictured top: Photograph of Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849–1921. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection.
Source: Joan Stahl. American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995).
Pictured bottom: Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849–1921, Virgin Enthroned, 1891, oil, 72 5/8 x 52 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.