If you hadn’t known his name, you’d recognize his idealized portraits of winged women. A Puritanical New Englander, he was the eccentric’s eccentric, sleeping outdoors throughout the year and maintaining a menagerie of animals within his home, ranging from monkeys, owls and porcupines to prairie dogs.
Through Aug. 21, in two large galleries displaying many images never before exhibited, the Williams College Art Museum profiles the work of a man often called “the father of camouflage,” Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921).
“I’m presenting him as a person who spent a lot of time thinking about how people and animals perceive the world around them,” Kevin Murphy told attendees at an opening day lecture. He created the exhibit and is the college’s curator of American art.
“I like the problems of art. I like the intellectual challenges, but I don’t get that emotionally invested in a lot of it,” Murphy said.
While a graduate student, however, he was struck by the timeless, ethereal quality of Thayer’s angels.
“Their eyes never line up and it creates a disconnect,” he said. “It creates this weird, otherworldly quality.”
The curator was also emotionally moved by Thayer’s dramatic, large-scale renderings of Mount Monadnock. Some time later, another facet of the artist was revealed.
Murphy discovered that “he was very, very involved in the invention of military camouflage.”
Thayer was intrigued with the qualities of light, and as a naturalist he studiously explored how the coloration of animals often allowed them to hide in plain sight. His ideas would lead to an acrimonious public debate with another outdoorsman — Teddy Roosevelt.
Thayer was a doctor’s son, and while a child his family moved to Keene, N.H. He became an avid outdoorsman; hunting, trapping and collecting specimens for taxidermy. He also had a flair for drawing and enrolled in New York art schools.
Following marriage to his first wife Kate, the couple sailed to France where he studied with the painter Jean Leon Gerome at the Ecole de Beaux Arts. The Frenchman’s work can be found no further away than the Clark Art Institute.
The Thayers began a family during their four years in Paris and as a rigidly proper couple, they frowned upon the city’s wilder aspects.
As one author wrote, their Latin Quarter apartment was an “oasis of morality in a sea of debaucherie.”
Parisian colleagues described the lean, short, balding student as “the serious man” and his intense self-portraits display a person who stares back, examining you.
Returning to America in 1879 he taught art, shared a studio at one point with Lincoln Monument sculptor Daniel Chester French and became a portraitist of society people.
The Thayer family would summer in Pittsfield, Nantucket and Dublin, N.H., and spend winters in Scarborough, N.Y. Despite commanding high prices for his art, his finances were frequently unstable.
The year 1889 would be bittersweet for the artist. In deep depression, his wife was committed to a sanatorium, where she would die three years later. In that same period, he became fast friends with the wealthy Detroit industrialist Charles Freer who bought his work and frequently provided loans to the artist.
Murphy, the exhibit’s curator, said that it’s difficult to launch a major show on Thayer because the most significant repository of his work remains at the Freer Museum, a stone’s throw from the National Mall. Thayer’s art, although available for the viewing public, is “highly restricted.”
“That’s true of everything in the collection,” Lee Glazer said during a phone call. “We don’t borrow. We don’t lend.”
An associate curator of American art at the museum, Glazer has often lectured on the New Englander’s work. Speaking on a cell phone while aboard a New York-bound Amtrak train, she described Thayer’s personality disorder.
“He had great periods of energetic creativity interspersed with long periods of dormancy,” she said. “He really aspired to be a great painter in the manner of the great artists of the Renaissance and his aspirations didn’t meet his level of satisfaction … He probably suffered from what we would now call Bipolar Disorder.”
The artist was aware of these mood swings and described them as “the Abbott pendulum.”
Murphy explained that it’s difficult to diagnose the disability of an artist from such a breadth of time. He noted, however, that Thayer’s doctor, in communication with a young Franklin Roosevelt, diagnosed the artist as neurasthenic. Working just four hours a day, Thayer complained of fatigue, irritability and carried a number of psychosomatic symptoms.
He was often uncertain of his painting’s effect and would abandon some for years, or leave others obviously unfinished. One story is that after readying a painting for transport he returned to the train station, uncrated the canvas and by lamplight added finishing touches.
“There’s a story of a landscape painting sold to Freer,” Glazer said. “He asked to come to his house to make changes. Freer refused.”
Ever the oddball, when Dublin painter George de Forest Brush, a close friend of Thayer, was on vacation he was unaware that Thayer had, without asking, undertaken revisions to his Colonial home. There was a modern staircase, new flooring and a bill for the renovations. Brush didn’t speak to Thayer again for years.
Other friendships endured, including a bond with John Singer Sargent. Murphy compared the two artists.
“Sargent was all about the economy of the brush stroke,” the curator said. “Thayer was the opposite of that.”
The artist’s approach, he said was “not to create an ideal form or a realism … it’s not about being an artist and having a facility with paint. In Thayer’s work there really is a struggle.”
Within four months of his wife’s death, the artist remarried and many struggles abated. His prices were higher than Winslow Homer’s, and now commanding up to $10,000 for a painting, his finances became more stable.
For the last 20 years of his life, he and his family lived in Dublin in a home he himself had designed, providing a clear view of Mount Monadnock. Hiking it almost daily and as a transcendentalist seeing God’s work throughout nature, he viewed the 3,000-foot peak as a spiritual totem.
To the consternation of visitors, the windows of the Thayer house were left open throughout the year and the family slept all 12 months in nearby lean-tos. Thayer had a phobia of germs — one reason why he home-schooled his three children.
In 1909 Thayer and his son Gerald published the illustrated book, “Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom,” setting off a firestorm of debate in the scientific community. The artist believed he’d solved the enigma as to why animals looked as they do.
He wrote that many animals, such as birds, are lightly toned on their underside and darkly colored above. He called this “countershading” and said that the mix flattened their features as camouflage. “Obliterative Marking” would be found, for example, in zebras. As vertically striped herds stood in high grasses near water holes, they would also be effectively camouflaged from predators.
“Our book,” Thayer wrote, “presents not theories, but revelations, as palpable and indisputable as radium X-Rays.”
Freshly back from a safari, Teddy Roosevelt was enraged, adding an appendix to his African book that skewered Thayer’s ideas.
“Zebras? They’re not camouflaged. I’ve shot 200 of them,” Murphy said, paraphrasing Roosevelt’s rebuke.
The ex-president noted that Zebras frequently drank while in the open and bolted at the slightest sign of danger. He dismissed Thayer’s ideas as “pushed to preposterous extremes” and belittled his book as “mischief.”
The quite public debate reverberated through magazine articles and letters for a lengthy period. (Thayer and Roosevelt did later share in a cause, however, in protecting birds from the rapacious use of feathers in the clothing and haberdashery industries)
Thayer was on to a significant idea and he saw the military applications. During World War I, the British and French adopted some forms of camouflage, largely inspired by the artist. By the next war, scores of artists worked for the U.S. Army with elaborate cryptic coloration strategies.
Glazer suggested a dynamic schism to the artist.
“It’s the way his work approaches art-science — the way that perception operates,” she said. His paintings echoed a classical period. “He was very old-fashioned, belonging very much to the last decade of the 19th century.”
She said, however, that his ideas about protective coloration of animals andmilitary camouflage “developed the modern notion that vision is not fixed, but changes depending on the environment.”
The artist died following a series of strokes and he was cremated at Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery. His ashes were scattered on the slopes of Mount Monadnock.
Upon his death John Singer Sargent said “Too bad he’s gone. He was the best of them.”
“Not Theories But Revelations” continues at the Williams College Art Museum through Aug. 21. A companion catalogue is available in mid-July. Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Closed Wednesday.
Admission is free. Directions: Take Route 2 west to Williamstown. The museum is in the center of campus on your left with large sculptural eyes on front lawn. Parking lots are on nearby Spring Street.