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Brother and Sister (Mary and Gerald Thayer)
Abbott Handerson Thayer (born Boston, MA 1849-died Dublin, NH 1921)
1889
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Classification
- Paintings
- Dimensions
- 36 1/4 x 28 1/4 in. (92 x 71.9 cm)
- Museum
- Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly
- Rights
- CC0 (Smithsonian Open Access), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Smithsonian Institution
About this work
This work portrays Abbott Thayer's children one year after their mother's hospitalization for "melancholia," or severe depression. Kate Thayer became physically ill while hospitalized, and Thayer wrote to a friend that her physical deterioration would not be so horrible "were her soul visible" (Anderson, Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1982). Thayer captured the sadness and worry of this difficult period in Mary's heavy-lidded, watery eyes and in Gerald’s searching expression. They look like a modern-day Madonna and Child. Their mother would live for two more years, but in this portrait it is as if Mary has already taken on her mother's role in the family. After Kate died, Thayer clung to his children as an emotional anchor, and he often depicted them as sacred figures.
