CLICK ON THUMBNAIL FOR LARGER PICTURE The image size of this print is 20 X 16. with ample margins
WINGED FIGURE SEATED UPON A ROCK by
Abbott Henderson Thayer (Amer., 1849-1921).
Abbott Handerson Thayer is best known today for his idealized likenesses of winged figures, but as an appealing and informative exhibition of over 60 works at the National Museum of American Art through September 6 reveals, he also created perceptive portraits, landscapes, still lifes and delicate nature studies.
A major figure in the so-called American Renaissance movement, Thayer's work covered a range of turn-of-the-century artistic approaches, from Gilded Age society likenesses to allegorical figures to awe-inspiring mountainscapes.
A strange but gifted individual, full of energy and new visions for art-making, Thayer (1849-1921) dedicated his career to painting "pictures of the highest human soul beauty." A devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he was a transcendentalist who found purity, truth and beauty in pristine nature.
Combining eccentricities with genius, Thayer merged his dual interest in art and science in his oeuvre, which was permeated with his profound sense of the spiritual. "Thayer's art combines Renaissance idealism with a modern concern for science," says Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art. "He shows us how America in the Gilded Age was poised between a reverence for past traditions and a new empirical approach."
