Winged Figure

1889·oil paint·130.8 × 95.9 cm (51 1/2 × 37 3/4 in.)

<p>This female angel is one of many that Abbott Handerson Thayer painted during his career. Originally a painter of animals, Thayer created portraits and then allegorical figures like this example after training in Paris. The artist wrote of his seraphic subjects, “I have put on wings probably more to symbolize an exalted atmosphere . . . where one need not explain the action of his figures.” Other late 19th-century artists such as <a href="https://www.artic.edu/artists/36518">Augustus Saint-Gaudens</a> also represented angelic female figures to personify what they perceived as the virtues of women. In <em>Winged Figure</em>, Thayer mixed this idealism with a level of naturalism, particularizing the woman’s features and giving her form a sense of mass and gravity.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1889
Medium: oil paint
Dimensions: 130.8 × 95.9 cm (51 1/2 × 37 3/4 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Abbott Handerson Thayer

Artist

Abbott Handerson Thayer

Mixed Media

Abbott Handerson Thayer was an American painter and theorist of camouflage whose work bridged late 19th-century academic portraiture and early modernist abstraction. Known for luminous figure paintings and allegorical compositions, he developed an influential theory of protective coloration in nature that extended into his artistic practice. His writings on camouflage and concealment in animal and human form shaped both artistic and military thinking in the early twentieth century. Thayer's late work became increasingly abstract, exploring the relationship between visibility, color, and form.

Boston, MA, USA

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