Polly Ethel Thayer

Polly Ethel Thayer was born to a distinguished Boston family; her father was the dean of Harvard Law School. She began her study of art early, at age ten, reminiscing, "As soon as I could hold a pencil, mother encouraged me."(1) She studied formally in Boston with the painter Philip Hale at the Museum of Fine Arts School in the 1920s, becoming adept at the academic realism for which the school was known. In the 1930s she pursued further training in New York, Provincetown, and Paris; as one contemporary account characterized, "She is going to look into this thing called modernism."(2) Her work at this time became more colorful and less highly naturalistic and detailed. Thayer quickly became successful, having solo shows in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, receiving numerous portrait commissions, and winning prizes for her paintings at the National Academy of Design in New York (1929) and the Tercentenary Art Exhibition in Boston (1930).

Thayer continued making art after she married the Boston lawyer and yachtsman Donald Starr in 1933 and while raising two daughters born in the early 1940s. With family responsibilities, however, she did not pursue public success as consistently as she had while a single woman. She gave up her atelier at Fenway Studios in 1936 and worked from home afterward. She said later of balancing roles of mother and artist, "You had to make such an enormous effort to find the time to work."(3) In her later work, she concentrated less on the human figure and more on landscapes as well as close studies of plants and insects. She experienced a rediscovery of sorts shortly before her death, when her art and career were featured in the Boston Museum of Fine Art's 2001 exhibition "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940." She was the only living artist whose work was included in the show.(4) Thayer died having reclaimed a place in the history of twentieth-century American art.

K.B.H.

NOTES:

1. Christine Temin, "Portrait in Determination," "Boston Globe", August 19, 2001.

2. Quoted in Erica E. Hirshler, "A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870-1940" (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), p. 153. Among her teachers were Charles Hawthorne, Carl Nelson, lithographer Harry Wickey, and Hans Hofmann, with whom she studied in Provincetown in summer 1933; see ibid., pp. 152-57, 197-98.

3. Temin, "Portrait."

4. Ibid.

EXTENDED BIO

Polly Thayer (Starr) (1904–2006) was a Boston painter and pastel artist. When she was still in her twenties she became known for portraits and figure compositions in the tradition of the Boston School, but took a more Modernist approach after leaving academia. She became increasingly interested in conveying the invisible essences of landscape, flowers and living creatures as her career developed, and was noted for the skilled draftsmanship which provided the substructure of her work. Named Ethel Randolph Thayer after her mother, the artist was the daughter of Harvard Law School Dean Ezra Ripley Thayer and Ethel Randolph Thayer, and granddaughter of legal scholar James Bradley Thayer. The love of exactitude brought out by her early upbringing in this vigorously intellectual family was tempered by the spiritual heritage of her Transcendentalist forebears, among whom was Ralph Waldo Emerson.[1][2]

Although she signed some of her early paintings Ethel Thayer, she had been known as Polly since childhood, and by the end of the 1920s generally signed her work Polly Thayer. She continued to use Polly Thayer as her brush name after she was married, although in 1967 she changed her name legally from Ethel Randolph Starr to Polly Thayer Starr.[3] Toward the end of her career she chose to identify herself professionally as Polly Thayer (Starr), but never used that name as a signature. Thayer attended Winsor School in Boston and showed an early aptitude for drawing which her mother encouraged by arranging for her to take after-school lessons with Beatrice Van Ness, who had been a student of Benson, Tarbell and Philip L. Hale. She transferred to Westover School in Middlebury, CT, and after graduation embarked with her mother and brother on a tour of the Orient which culminated in her witnessing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, an event she viewed as a turning point in her perception of life.[2][4]

That autumn Thayer entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she studied figure drawing with Hale and portrait painting with Leslie Prince Thompson for about a year and a half, when she left to study privately with Hale. While still under Hale’s tutelage she painted a large nude, Circles, which in 1929 was awarded the National Academy of Design's coveted Julius Hallgarten Prize. She also studied in 1924 with Charles W. Hawthorne, who “keyed up the palette a lot” with his outdoor classes in Provincetown.[2][5][6]

Encouraged by Royal Cortissoz of the New York Herald Tribune, who wrote to her that “The [Prado] is like a university and to copy Velasquez there is like listening to one master with a dozen others putting their oars in in the recesses,”[7] Thayer traveled to Spain in 1930, and became particularly fascinated with Goya before continuing her studies in France. She rented the studio-apartment of Waldo Pierce in Paris, where she worked while attending life drawing classes at the studio of André Lhote. In subsequent years she studied further with Harry Wickey at the Art Students League of New York; Jean Despujols at the École des Beaux-Arts, Fontainebleau; Carl Nelson in Boston; and Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. After many years’ apprehension as to how marriage would affect her artistic impetus, Thayer married Donald C. Starr, attorney, sportsman, musician and yachtsman, in Genoa in 1933, when he was midway on a voyage around the world with six friends in his schooner 'Pilgrim'. She herself did not take to sailing, and a few years later, when after two weeks on the water she asked to be put ashore at Old Lyme, Connecticut, she saw the land as she had never seen it before.[2] She began a series of landscape paintings which were characterized by D. Rhodes Johnson as “the work of a folk artist with technical training...It has the freshness of the conception of a primitive, but is never out of drawing.”[11] The portrait of May Sarton, done around the same time, evinces a different aspect of this new freedom of expression, as Thayer found herself experimenting with portraiture in a world not constrained by tonal values.[5]

The Starrs had two daughters, Victoria and Dinah, the first born in 1940. In 1942 Thayer joined the Society of Friends (Quakers), which from that time became an important part of her life and identity.[12] She took an active interest in many educational, charitable and cultural institutions, among them the Boston Public Library and the Institute of Contemporary Art, and was especially devoted to the causes of peace and non-violence. She also joined the Nucleus and the Tuesday Club, which met to discuss topics of current interest. The spirit of some of those meetings is preserved in small sketches she made while she listened.[13]

Although she was fortunate enough to have domestic help for support in some of her household and family duties, Thayer was reluctant to spend what time she had on organization and promotion. Robert F. Brown of the Smithsonian Archives of American art concluded after several interviews in which Thayer had been asked little about her later work, “Thayer freely admitted that the demands of child-rearing, social life, and with her conversion to Quakerism, an increasing absorption in progressive social concerns, caused her artistic career to go into permanent eclipse.”[2] The lower profile of her career, however, did not in fact mean that she was any less ardent in her endeavors, and the six solo exhibitions she did mount in the decades between the birth of her first child and the loss of her vision in the 1990s attest to the force of her artistic activity. She continued her work in portraiture, while her more private pursuits included explorations into the nature of landscape, flowers and animals, especially cats, always seeking to reveal their essential being. “The only way I can see or understand is that of through the visible to the invisible reality,” she commented.[10] Thayer had long been fascinated by the dynamics, meaning and variety of visual experience. In 1981 the Friends Journal published her essay “On Seeing,”[14] a paper she continued to refine until she was ninety-seven, and around the same time she learned that she had glaucoma, which was later complicated by macular degeneration. Increasingly aware of the fragility of her vision, she concentrated on lavish pastels of gladiolas with their bees and an increasingly abstract sequence of cyclamen flowers drawn in chalk on black paper with touches of color, as well as delicate series of graphite drawings based on the life cycle of the thistle. In 1992 she completed her last major work, a charcoal self-portrait which is notable for the luminosity of one side of her face and the darkness of the other. Between the time she became unable to practice her craft and her death in 2006, the stature of her work was recognized in eleven solo exhibitions.[15]

REFERENCES

"The Harvard Graduates' Magazine", Volume 24 by William Roscoe Thayer et al., p.259.

^ Jump up to: a b c d e f Oral history interview with Polly Thayer, 1995 May 12 - 1996 Feb. 1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Jump up ^ Donald C. Starr, "Memorandum relating to the correct identification of Polly Thayer Starr," among the Polly Thayer (Starr) papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Jump up ^ Dorothy Koval, "Poetry of Hand and Spirit" Poetry of Hand and Spirit: Paintings and Drawings by Polly Thayer (Starr), Boston: Vose Galleries, 2001; p.3.

^ Jump up to: a b c Hirshler, Erica E. A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940. Boston: MFA Publications, 2001, pp. 152-55, 197-198.

Jump up ^ Meredith Fife Day, “The Education of an Artist”, Art New England, Oct-Nov 2004, p. 12.

Jump up ^ Letter from Royal Cortissoz to Polly Thayer, July 29, 1929, now among the Polly Thayer (Starr) papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Jump up ^ Boston Globe, January 9, 1931.

Jump up ^ A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940"

^ Jump up to: a b Catalogues, announcements, reviews, exhibition lists and photographs now among the Polly Thayer (Starr) papers at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.

Jump up ^ "The Arts - Here and There" by D.Rhodes Johnson, undated clipping review of wartime exhibition at Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York City

Jump up ^ Polly Thayer (Starr), “What Being a Quaker Means to Me,” written for the Friends Meeting at Cambridge, MA, 1993, now among the Polly Thayer (Starr) Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Jump up ^ Images of some of these sketches may be seen online at People at Meetings. A group of the sketches is also among the Tuesday Club Records at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America

Jump up ^ Friends Journal, October 1/5, 1981.

Jump up ^ A list of her exhibitions can be seen online at pollythayerstarr.org

Jump up ^ K.B.H., emuseum, New Britain Museum of American Art.

Jump up ^ A. J. Philpott, The Boston Globe (undated clipping, probably 1935.)

Jump up ^ Erica Hirshler in "A Studio of Her Own," Antiques and Fine Art, 2001.

Jump up ^ Burgard, Timothy Anglin. "Polly Thayer and May Sarton: Portrait of the Artists as Young Women." Harvard University Art Museums Review 1994.

Jump up ^ NYC Art News (clipping), 1941

Jump up ^ Sebastien Smee, "Finding the Wit in 'Shopping for Furs,' The Boston Globe, June 22, 2010.

Jump up ^ Grob, Mollie C. “Reflections: One’s Life Work; Polly Thayer Starr’s Conversation with Mollie C. Grob." Brookhaven Voice, Lexington, MA March, 2001:6-7

Jump up ^ Carsten, Robert K. “Polly Thayer Starr.” Pastel Journal October