Thayer's Angel

Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1849 – 1921, was an American artist, naturalist, and teacher. As a painter of portraits, figures, animals and landscapes, he enjoyed a certain prominence during his lifetime, as shown by the fact that his paintings are in the most important U.S. art collections. He is largely known as a painter of “ideal figures,” in which he portrayed women as embodiments of virtue, adorned in flowing white tunics and equipped with feathered angel’s wings. Thayer's angels are his best-known paintings. As one art critic mused: "They come near to us, there is a lovely hint of the human and intimate in them, yet they are not of the earth." Thayer made no attempt to explain these enigmatic figures, saying only that the wings were meant to lift the figure out of the commonplace. Yet for him these winged figures had personal meaning. The first angel was a portrait of his daughter Mary, painted in 1887. That is this painting.