Abbott Handerson Thayer

Thayer received his initial training at the Brooklyn Art School in 1867 and attended the National Academy of Design in the 1870s. In 1875, he traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Thayer wrote that his teacher there, Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904), "admirably held up to us all the examples of the masters of the Renaissance, and these have continued to be my luminaries." Regarded as the founder of the art colony at Dublin, New Hampshire, Thayer spent summers there beginning in 1888, when his patron, Mrs. Mary Amory Greene, offered to build him a house. His Dublin studio contained photographs of Michelangelo's frescos, casts of Greek sculpture, and a plaster reproduction of a Donatello Madonna over the fireplace.

Thayer's Mother and Child, a portrait of his wife and son Gerald, evokes Renaissance renderings of the Madonna and Child. The painting's lavishly decorated frame was designed for Thayer by architect Stanford White (1853-1906), who also worked in the style known as "American Renaissance," much in demand in the 1880s by wealthy patrons of both public and private art and architecture. Around the tum of the century, Thayer's friend and neighbor, Joseph Lindon Smith, designed his own Italian villa in Dublin.