Polly ThayerOil Painting Still Life Fruit Bowl Polly Thayer Boston Modernist Woman Artist, c. 20th century

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Polly Thayer Starr (1904-2006)
Oil Painting
Still Life Fruit Bowl
Dimensions: Frame: 12.5" X 15.5", Image: 8.5" X 11.5"

Polly … Read more Polly Thayer Starr (1904-2006)
Oil Painting
Still Life Fruit Bowl
Dimensions: Frame: 12.5" X 15.5", Image: 8.5" X 11.5"

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.
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. 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 Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell and Philip 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 Kantō earthquake of 1923, an event she viewed as a turning point in her perception of life.
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.
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 the recesses,” 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 French Cubist artist André Lhote. In subsequent years she studied further with American artist 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.

Exhibitions
Thayer's first solo exhibition, at Doll & Richards in Boston, opening on New Year's Eve, 1930, was so well received that the Globe reviewer declared it “surely settles her status as one of the foremost painters in the country. It brought her commissions for eighteen portraits, many of which she exhibited at Wildenstein's in New York the following year. Among the galleries that subsequently gave her solo shows were the Sessler Gallery in Philadelphia; Contemporary Arts and Pietrantonio Galleries in New York; and in Boston the Guild of Boston Artists, Grace Horne Galleries, Child's Gallery, The Copley Society, the St. Botolph Club and the Boston Public Library. In her later years she renewed an early affiliation with Vose Galleries which she maintained for the rest of her life. In 2001 she was the only living artist included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, "A Studio of Her Own", and a banner of her portrait of May Sarton hung over the entrance to the Museum.
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. 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.” 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. 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. 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.
She mounted six solo exhibitions in the decades between the birth of her first child and the loss of her vision in the 1990s which 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.
Early in her career, she worked winters at her home in Boston and summers at Weir River Farm in Hingham.
Thayer had long been fascinated by the dynamics, meaning and variety of visual experience. In 1981 the Friends Journal published her essay “On Seeing,” 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. The concentration of her effort is revealed in an extraordinary collection of works on paper, many of them done with white chalk on black background, others incorporating pastel, watercolor, oil, or collage materials. The images, balancing between the seen and the unseen, lure the viewer into a world quite different from that of the dedicated flower lover or even the paintings of a Georgia O’Keeffe. 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.

Notable works
Circles, c. 1928, "is the painting that established Thayer as a major talent in America and won her a prestigious Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1929." "This particular picture seemed like a challenge to the distortionists, whose work usually required considerable literary subtlety and aimless phraseology by way of explanation. That picture didn’t have to be explained. Here was the healthy body of a young woman, done to the life. It was honest.”
"My Childhood Trees", c. 1938, "became one of fewer than ten paintings in the Museum’s American collection at that time that could be characterized as modern (even including the Ashcan School) and it was the first one to have been painted by a Boston artist,” according to Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Boston Globe critic Sebastian Smee commented of Shopping for Furs that "The bored, dispirited face of Thayer’s anonymous sitter is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in art: self-possession, deep exhaustion, and a longing for release all rolled into one... The jaunty hat and dangling left hand, meanwhile, communicate splendid insouciance"
Soldiers, 1944: Asked in her later years to identify some of her most treasured work, Thayer replied: “During World War II, I went out nightly to the Officers’ Club in Boston to do pencil drawings of the young men, which I gave to them... The soldiers came from all over the country, passing through Boston on their way to being shipped out. The poignancy of those young men who were going to war, who might never see the year out, had something to do with those drawings.”
Iris, "created in a seamless blend of watercolor and pastel, is a master work where color seems to unite form and space into a shifting composition. Some areas of the flower appear solid and real; in other areas the gossamer petals seem to be theoretical, as if composed of form and space or of a luminous atmosphere.”
She is included in Hirshler, Erica E. A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940. Boston: MFA Publications, 2001, pp. 152-55, 197-198.
Adelaide Cole Chase, Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, Ellen Day Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Laura Coombs Hills, Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington, Gretchen Woodman Rogers, Sarah Choate Sears, Elizabeth Morse Walsh,
Katharine Lane Weems, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Anne Whitney.
Burgard, Timothy Anglin. "Polly Thayer and May Sarton: Portrait of the Artists as Young Women." Harvard University Art Museums Review 1994.
Gerdts, William H. and Nancy Hall-Duncan. “The Great American Nude" American Art Review August 2002:160-65.

Select Exhibitions
Polly Thayer Starr’s Burning Bush, deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA.
Polly Thayer Starr: Nearer the Essence, Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA.
Women Take The Floor, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. September
Solo Retrospective, Rockport Art Association & Museum, Rockport, MA.
Vose Galleries of Boston, MA
St. Botolph Club, Boston, MA
Dolphin Gallery, Hingham, MA
Copley Society, Boston, MA 1981, 1994, 1996
Boston Public Library, Boston, MA 1969
Pietrantonio Galleries, New York, NY 1964
Childs Gallery, Boston, MA 1963
Sessler Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 1956
Contemporary Arts, New York, NY 1941
Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA 1936
Guild of Boston Artists, Boston, MA 1932
Wildenstein & Co., Inc., New York, NY 1932
Doll and Richards Gallery, Boston, MA 1931, 1935

Selected Group Exhibitions
Boston Art Club, Boston, MA
Boston Institute of Modern Art, Boston, MA (now the Institute of Contemporary Art)
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO
National Academy of Design, New York, NY
National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, New York, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

Permanent Collections
Addison Gallery, Andover, MA
Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA
Brigham Young University Museum of Fine Arts, Provo, UT
Brown University, Providence, RI
DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA
Eliot House, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Langdell Library, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Mystic Museum, Mystic, CT
New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lambert Collection, Philadelphia, PA
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, MA
Williams College, Williamstown, MA See less