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Winged Figure
Abbott Handerson Thayer (American, 1849–1921)
1889
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 130.8 × 95.9 cm (51 1/2 × 37 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Arts of the Americas
- Credit line
- Simeon B. Williams Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
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 Augustus Saint-Gaudens also represented angelic female figures to personify what they perceived as the virtues of women. In Winged Figure, Thayer mixed this idealism with a level of naturalism, particularizing the woman’s features and giving her form a sense of mass and gravity.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
