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6 unusual facts about Abbott Handerson Thayer


Abbott Handerson Thayer

Among his devoted apprentices were Rockwell Kent, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Richard Meryman, Barry Faulkner (Thayer's cousin), Alexander and William James (the sons of Harvard philosopher William James), and Thayer's own son and daughter, Gerald and Gladys.

This is not entirely unreasonable, because, while he did not invent camouflage, he was undoubtedly one of the first to write about certain aspects of it, including disruptive camouflage to break up an object's outlines, of masquerade, as when a butterfly mimics a leaf (though here he was anticipated by Bates, Wallace, and Poulton), and especially of countershading.

Returning to New York, he established his own portrait studio (which he shared with Daniel Chester French), became active in the Society of American Painters, and began to take in apprentices.

Dublin Pond

Many prominent artists stayed in the community, including Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Abbott Handerson Thayer, and Joseph Lindon Smith.

Dwight William Tryon

Tryon traveled and sketched Europe with his wife, and met Abbott Handerson Thayer and his wife with whom he became friends.

Sherry Edmundson Fry

He showed it to a friend, New Hampshire painter Barry Faulkner, who was a cousin of Abbott Handerson Thayer (the so-called "father of camouflage"), and a former student of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.


Stevenson Memorial

Stevenson Memorial is a 1903 oil painting by the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer, intended to commemorate the writer Robert Louis Stevenson.


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