Here Comes the Bride

This beautiful bride by Abbott Thayer, along with over fifty treasures of impressionism, has just arrived at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum will be on view in Portland through October 21, 2001.

Thayer himself could not remember who this bride was. An acquaintance recounted a visit she made to his studio around 1918, where she found him ruminating over the sitter's identity. Thayer ultimately decided to send a photograph of the portrait to a lady he thought might have been the bride in question.

Since then, the picture has been shown to be a preparatory sketch for a larger, finished oil painting of Alice Maude Allen Atwater of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In this society portrait, Thayer displays his gift for capturing a dignified pose and a good likeness.

The unfinished quality of the work reveals his method of loosely creating the overall composition before elaborating the details. In the finished painting, the artist would scrupulously render the Japanese cloth of gold of the wedding gown with its ornamented bodice of Belgian rose-point lace.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000).

Pictured: Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849–1921, A Bride, oil, about 1895, 21 x 17 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.