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Thayer's unusual Dublin, New Hampshire, house speaks volumes about the painter. Built in 1888 on land provided by Mary Amory Greene, a direct descendant of the colonial portraitist John Singleton Copley, the two-story building sported several screened-in porches and was surrounded by a number of sleeping huts—small lean-to structures that broke down the harriers of traditional Victorian domestic space and encouraged a rustic, almost wild atmosphere. The unruly house and unusual artist were not without their contradictions. To the right of the front door, mounted on a bracket, stood a copy of Daniel Chester French's famous bust of Ralph Waldo Emerson—a symbol of the intellectual rigor expected of family and guests. Thayer was the patriarch of an extended family of blood relations, servants, and models who became year-round residents of Dublin in 1901. His career had begun much earlier, first as an animal painter and then as a student at the National Academy of Design in New York and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. At the latter, he studied under Jean Léon Gérôme. After Thayer returned from Paris (1879), he began painting ethereal women and children and writing about natural history, particularly the development of animal coloration. Lost in the wild or in his vision of idealized female form, Thayer sought an alternative to the banality of the modern world.

William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, editors, with contributions by Dona Brown, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Judith K. Maxwell, Stephen Nissenbaum, Bruce Robertson, Roger B. Stein, and William H. Truettner Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Conn; and London: National Museum of American Art with Yale University Press, 1999)