Arts and Letters

Abbott Handerson Thayer became a member of the Academy October 20, 1909, and died May 29, 1921. He was born in Boston on the 12th of August, 1849, and became a pupil of Gérôme and Lehmann at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. His art was dedicated almost entirely to the dignity and loveliness of womanhood and to the charm of childhood, and it is marked throughout by thought, refinement, distinction, and spirituality. His achievement is in the purest field of art, and his earnest and deep-set eyes sought and found the elements that lie at the very root of beauty. In his pursuit of nobility of form he avoided the characterlessness which comes from too great generalization; his vision was set not only upon a type but upon an individual of the type. Adolescence appealed to him intensely, and as chosen models he reared up around his own fireside a brood of angels to whose humanity he fitted wings, just as did the masters of the quattrocento. These figures sit in his pilastered and pedimented frames, and look out at us, now sturdy, now ethereal, and are perhaps what we remember best among his presentations.

Together with austerity in his feeling went the freedom of a very personal technique. He was willing to experiment in every direction, eschewing the study of nothing save what approached vulgarity. His color, which was often, indeed most often, beautiful, corresponded to his temperament, but was controlled also by an observation so curious, so nature-loving, that he gave virtually ten years of his life to a minute investigation of the handiwork of the Great Master in birds and beasts and fishes. Some of this observation he gave out in his works of research which he called Studies of Protective Coloration in Animals, and it enabled him also to offer valuable service during the late World War. By laying before the naval experts of the Allies his miniature demonstrations in pigment, clay, and cardboard of the vanishing properties of colors, he contributed materially to the success of camouflage.

In figure painting as well as in landscape the beauty which appealed to him most surely was that of loftiness and grandeur; yet this note of austerity did not exclude tenderness. He was above affectation in the arts, and saw beyond the ephemeral. In his admiration of the old masters he often mentioned Tintoretto to me as a favorite, perhaps as the artist of his predilection; but he remained modern in the true sense of the word, and faithful to himself.

Like all whose aim is set high, he was not always equal, and some variation in his success must be attributed to his frequent experimentation; but one felt that his work was invariably on the highest plane. His noble and solid canvases hold the wall with authority; in many cases by their character as well as by their subject they seem real "enthronements" of loveliness. Certainly he was an artist through and through, one of whom America may be lastingly proud.