Abbott Handerson Thayer
(1849-1921)

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Abbott Handerson Thayer was an American artist and naturalist. Thayer painted portraits, animals and landscapes. Thayer was born in Boston but spent much of his childhood in New Hampshire. While living in rural New Hamshire, Thayer studied birds, hunted and made watercolor paintings of animals.

When Thayer was eighteen he moved to Brooklyn where he studied painting at the Brooklyn Art School and the National Academy of Design. Thayer moved to Paris with his wife and continued his studies at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts. When Thayer returned to America from Europe he opened a studio in New York where he hired apprentices to help him with his steady flow of commissions. Thayer painted portraits of important writers such as Mark Twain and Henry James. In addition to painting celebrities, Thayer frequently painted his children. After two of Thayer's children tragically died, he suffered greatly, decided to leave New York and concentrated on painting his three surviving children frequently

Thayer spent some time working for the US Biological Survey before settling with his wife in Dublin, New Hampshire. When Thayer’s wife died, he remarried a long-time friend named Emma Beach. The family remained in rural New Hampshire and spent most of their time outside. Though Thayer suffered from bi-polar disorder, he remained active as a painter and an innovator of uses for camouflage. Thayer proposed that soldiers should wear camouflage rather than khaki uniforms.

Invisible: Abbott Thayer and the Art of Camouflage, a documentary film about Thayer’s life and work premiered at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2008. Thayer’s work is in major American Art collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Academy of Design, National Museum of American Art, and Art Institute of Chicago. Do you think you own a painting by Abbott Handerson Thayer. Contact us. We are the Abbott Handerson Thayer experts.