A Captivating Ideal

Today we feature Abbott Handerson Thayer, known for his paintings of angels.

Thayer, the son of a prominent Boston physician, was destined to become the archidealist of his time. He studied first at the Brooklyn Art School and New York's National Academy of Design and in 1875 sailed to Paris to work with Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts.

Back in New York he established a studio and commenced work on a series of highly idealized paintings of virginal American beauties garbed in flowing classical gowns and rendered in rich, painterly oils.… Unlike the iconic "Gibson girl," the assertive beauty delineated by Charles D. Gibson, Thayer's damsels remained passive and quietly decorative, even when endowed with wings.

In Girl Arranging Her Hair, an introspective young woman inclines her head as she gently draws her long, silky brown hair back from her face. Her heavy-lidded eye and full lips offset the lines of her pure profile. A Greco-Roman-style robe drapes her bosom; its white folds are inflected with greens and pinks that echo the bloom in her cheeks. The sitter is Alma Wollerman, wife of Thayer's son, Gerald, and mother of his two grandsons. Alma frequently modeled for Thayer and for his friend, Thomas Wilmer Dewing. Thayer painted numerous versions of this work but claimed he had "never painted anything to compare with this Botticelli-like Alma head." Like many of Thayer's enigmatic images of angels, this picture seems both sensual and ambiguous.

See more of Thayer's visual delights in our traveling exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine, through October 21, 2001. Online visitors can also explore our virtual exhibition Abbott Handerson Thayer.

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, Girl Arranging Her Hair, 1918–1919, oil, 25 5/8 x 24 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.