Title

Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Antimodernism, and the Fear of Disease

Authors

Elizabeth Lee, Dickinson College

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2004

Department

Art and Art History

Language

English

Publication Title

American Art

Abstract

The subject of female purity constituted a dominant theme for American artists in the late nineteenth century. Artists such as Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Dewing and others depicted women—whether in domestic interiors, outdoor settings or in more indeterminate spaces—as wholesome, refined, and chaste. But these pictures were created within a context that seems utterly at odds with the theme they represent. Late‐nineteenth‐century America was characterized by massive immigration, working‐class violence, overcrowded housing for the poor, garbage‐filled streets, industrial pollution, and the spread of epidemic disease. For the most part, scholars have assumed that this process of modernization unfolded independently of artists’ imagery of ideal white women. This essay argues, however, that the pictures may not have been as disengaged as their subjects or manner of painting suggest. In Thayer’s case, persistent references in his letters and other writings to disease, prostitution, garbage, and germs indicate that the chaste, angelic surfaces of his figures cloak profound concerns. In his depictions of female purity and raw nature, Thayer used paint to work through his fears, which only increased with the illness and subsequent death of his first wife, Kate. Thayer sought to protect himself and his family from bodily disintegration by adopting a therapeutic, outdoors‐oriented life in the shadow of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock, which became a shrine to the pursuit of good health. His art was motivated by similar concerns: disease becomes an organizing topos through which his paintings take shape.

Comments

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit The University of Chicago Press's Website.

© 2004 Smithsonian Institution

The images contained in the published version of this publication are not available to download due to copyright.

DOI

10.1086/427531

Recommended Citation

Lee, Elizabeth. "Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Antimodernism, and the Fear of Disease." American Art 18, no. 3 (2004): 32-51. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/427531.