Abbott Handerson Thayer painted angels using his own children as models, and that mix of the heavenly and the entirely familiar is what makes his figures such rewarding subjects for counted cross stitch.
He was an American painter, born in 1849 and died in 1921, and he was a naturalist and a teacher as well. Portraits, figures, animals and landscape painting all came under his brush, and he was well regarded in his own lifetime, with work held in major American collections. Still, it is the winged figures that people remember. There is something plain and unsentimental about them, perhaps because the faces belonged to real children he saw every day rather than to some imagined ideal.
Thayer studied under Jean-Leon Gerome.
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22+ Years
Designing Patterns
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Since 2003
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