Everything about Abbott Handerson Thayer totally explained
Abbott Handerson Thayer (
August 12,
1849 –
May 29,
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. In the last third of his life, he worked together with his son,
Gerald Handerson Thayer, on a major book about
protective coloration in nature, titled
Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom: An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise Through Color and Pattern; Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Disclosures. First published by Macmillan in 1909, then reissued in 1918, it had a widespread impact on the use of military
camouflage during World War I. He also influenced American art through his efforts as a teacher, taking on apprentices in his
New Hampshire studio.
Formative years
Thayer was born in
Boston, Massachusetts. The son of a country doctor, his childhood was spent in rural New Hampshire, near
Keene, at the foot of
Mount Monadnock. In that rural setting, he became an amateur
naturalist (in his own words, he was “bird crazy”), a hunter and a trapper. He also experimented with
taxidermy and developed a life-long interest in art by making watercolor paintings of animals.
At age 18, he moved to
Brooklyn,
New York, to study painting at the
Brooklyn Art School and the
National Academy of Design. In 1875, having married Kate Bloede, he moved to
Paris, where he studied for four years at the
École des Beaux-Arts, with
Henri Lehmann and
Jean-Léon Gérome, and where his closest friend became the American artist
George de Forest Brush. Returning to New York, he set up his own portrait studio (which he shared with
Daniel Chester French), became active in the
Society of American Painters, and began to take in apprentices.
Return to New Hampshire
Life became all but unbearable for Thayer and his wife in the early 1880s, when two of their small children died unexpectedly, just one year apart. Emotionally devastated, they gradually left New York. In 1898, Thayer visited
St Ives, Cornwall and, carrying an introductory letter from C. Hart Merrian, the Chief of the US Biological Survey in
Washington, D.C., applied to the lord of the Manor of St Ives and Treloyhan, Henry Arthur Mornington Wellesley, the 3rd Earl Cowley, for permission to collect specimens of birds from the cliffs at St Ives. In 1901, he and his wife settled permanently in
Dublin, New Hampshire, where they'd often vacationed and where Thayer had grown up. Soon after, when her father died, Thayer’s wife lapsed into an irreversible depression, which led to her confinement in an asylum, the decline of her health, and eventual death.
Soon after, Thayer married their long-time friend, Emma Beach, whose father owned
The New York Sun. He and his second wife spent their remaining years in rural New Hampshire, living and working productively with the three remaining Thayer children, Mary, Gerald and Gladys. Throughout this latter part of his life, among Thayer’s Dublin neighbors was George de Forest Brush, with whom (when they were not quarreling) he collaborated on matters pertaining to camouflage.
Artistic achievements
It is difficult to speak simply and conclusively about Thayer as an artist. He was often described in first person accounts as eccentric and mercurial, and there's a parallel contradictory mix of academic tradition, spontaneity and improvisation in his artistic methods. For example, he's 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. At the same time, he did this using methods that were surprisingly unorthodox, unfettered and surprising, such as purposely mixing dirt into the paint, or (in one instance at least) using a broom instead of a brush to lessen the sense of rigidity in a newly finished, still wet painting. He survived with the help of his patrons, among them the industrialist
Charles Lang Freer. Some of his finest works are in the collections of the
Freer Gallery of Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
National Academy of Design,
National Museum of American Art, and
Art Institute of Chicago.
Teaching
Thayer was also resourceful in his teaching, which he saw as a useful, inseparable part of his own studio work. Among his devoted apprentices were
Rockwell Kent,
Louis Agassiz Fuertes,
Richard Meryman,
Barry Faulkner (Thayer’s cousin), Alexander and William James (the sons of Harvard philosopher
William James), and Thayer’s own son and daughter, Gerald and Gladys.
In a letter to
Thomas W. Dewing (c.1917, in the collection of the
Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution), Thayer reveals that his method was to work on a new painting for only three days. If he worked longer on it, he said, he'd either accomplish nothing or would ruin it. So on the fourth day, he'd instead take a break, getting as far from the work as possible, but meanwhile instruct each student to make an exact copy of that three-day painting. Then, when he did return to his studio, he'd (in his words) “pounce on a copy and give it a three-day shove again.” As a result, he'd of course end up with alternate versions of the same painting, in substantially different finished states.
Camouflage contributions
Thayer is sometimes referred to as the “father of camouflage.” This isn't entirely unreasonable, because, while he didn't invent camouflage, he was undoubtedly one of the first to conduct extensive research on and to write about certain aspects of protective coloration in nature. In particular, beginning in 1892, he wrote about the function of
countershading in nature, by which forms appear less round and less solid through inverted shading, by which he accounted for the white undersides of animals. This finding is widely accepted today, and is sometimes now called
Thayer’s Law.
He first became involved in military camouflage in 1898, during the
Spanish-American War, when he and his friend Brush proposed the use of protective coloration on American ships, using countershading. While the war didn't last long enough for anything to come of this, the two artists did obtain a patent for their idea in 1902, titled “Process of Treating the Outsides of Ships, etc., for Making Them Less Visible” (
U.S. Patent No. 715,013), in which their method is described as having been modeled on the coloration of a
seagull.
Thayer and Brush’s experiments in camouflage continued into
World War I, both collaboratively and separately. Early in that war, for example, Brush developed a transparent airplane, while Thayer continued his interest in disruptive or high-difference camouflage, which wasn't unlike what British ship camouflage designer
Norman Wilkinson would call
dazzle camouflage (a term that may have been inspired by Thayer's writings, which referred to disruptive patterns in nature as “razzle dazzle”.)
Gradually, Thayer and Brush increasingly entrusted their camouflage work to the responsibility of their sons.
Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), which had taken seven years to prepare, was credited to Thayer’s son, Gerald. At about the same time, Thayer once again proposed ship camouflage to the U.S. Navy (and was again unsuccessful), this time working not with Brush, but with Brush's son, Gerome (named in honor of his father's teacher).
A few years later, with the start of World War I, Thayer ineptly made proposals to the
British War Office, trying to persuade them to adopt a disruptively patterned
field service uniform, in place of monochrome
khaki. Meanwhile, Thayer and
Gerome Brush’s proposal for the use of countershading in ship camouflage was approved for use on American ships, and a handful of Thayer enthusiasts (among them Barry Faulkner and other Thayer students) recruited hundreds of artists to join the
American Camouflage Corps.
Later years
By his own admission, Thayer often suffered from a condition that today is called
bipolar disorder. In his letters, he described it as “the Abbott pendulum,” by which his emotions precariously swung back and forth between the two extremes of (in his words) “all-wellity” and “sick disgust.” This condition apparently worsened as the controversy grew about his camouflage findings (most notably when they were denounced by former U.S. President
Theodore Roosevelt). As he aged, he increasingly suffered from
panic attacks (which he called “fright-fits”), nervous exhaustion, and suicidal thoughts, so much so that he was no longer allowed to go out in his boat alone on
Dublin Pond.
At age 72, Thayer was disabled by a series of strokes, and died quietly at home on May 29, 1921.
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