ABBOTT HANDERSON
THAYER 1849-1921
Meditation, 1903
Oil on canvas, 24 x 19" (60.96 x 48.26 cm.)
Signed, upper right
Museum purchase, 922-0-107
Painted in the twilight of his career, Meditation epitomized Abbott Thayer's search for
moral truth, which he believed could be divined through the earnest contemplation of a
beautiful female. Thayer, from a prominent New England family, studied art in Boston, and,
in the early 1870s, painted animal portraits in Brooklyn, New York. From 1876 to 1878 he
traveled abroad, before enrolling in Jean-Leon Gerome's atelier. Thayer and his young
wife, Kate, maintained a Right-Bank apartment, keeping away from the Latin Quarter
bohemian haunts frequented by other painting students. After some critical success in the
early 1880s, Thayer returned to America a more confident and cosmopolitan artist with
European sensibilities that marked his portraits of New England women done during the rest
of the decade.
Gratified by the patronage of Albert Freer, Thayer, weary of commissioned portraits, was
now free to paint what he called "expressions." His first major example, Angel
(1888, The National Museum of American Art), excited reviewers when it was shown at the
1889 Universal Exposition in Paris. Throughout the 1890s and into the early years of the
twentieth century, Thayer produced a succession of idealized angels, goddesses, and
madonnas, painted for reasons psychological and historical. His search for feminine
innocence may have been a way of shutting the door on tragic memories in his life. Two of
his young sons died in 1886, and his first wife, Kate, never recovered from a clinical
case of melancholy.3 Thayer was also among many artists and writers who were beginning to
feel that America of the Gilded Age was deficient in beauty, breeding, and morality. Thus,
he attached his art to the new Cult of the Virgin, which social historians say offered
refuge for sensitive souls from the crass, business culture of
post-Civil War America. George deForest Brush, Kenyon Cox, Thomas Dewing, and Augustus
Saint Gaudens joined Thayer in nurturing the concept of the ennobled female, a symbol of
the moral purity needed to ward off the distressing realities of a money-crazed age.
While Thayer shared these general biases, his own symbolic art was not identical to Cox's
Virgilian tableaus or to Dewing's green, gauzy dreams. In Meditation, Thayer eliminates
all allegorical prop swings, halos, etc.-as well as the Arcadian setting, concentrating
instead on extracting the ideal from the concrete. Partly aided by photographs, he
carefully delineated the individual facial features of his favorite model, Bessie Price,
who posed for a number of his allegorical or symbolic works. Her stern expression and
severe frontal stance creates a watchful atmosphere, while the restricted palette tuned to
the chocolate brown dress demonstrates Thayer's respect for the portraits of Titian and
Diego Velazquez. This personified female is, in effect, an icon; by prolonged
contemplation we can be led to believe, as Thayer did, that she is touched with grace. The
specific features of her face gradually release noble moral truth, evoking a quiet strain
of "pleasurable melancholy."
Thayer was living in semi-seclusion in Dublin, New Hampshire when he painted Meditation.
He had been an active member of the progressive Boston art colony and had been invited to
join The Ten. But Symbolist art, so much in favor during the fin de siecle, lost almost
all its following after 1910, and Thayer's reputation entered a period of steady decline,
despite the fact that he then began painting some of the most abstract landscapes seen in
America.