Currently not on view
Monadnock, Winter Sunrise,
1919
Thayer established his reputation mainly with portraits of fashionable women evocative of his Parisian training, but soon gravitated toward the more subdued aesthetic evident in his hauntingly beautiful series of paintings of Mount Monadnock, which he created after moving to the nearby town of Dublin, New Hampshire, in 1901. The peak exerted a powerful attraction for Thayer. From his home, he painted repeated winter views of the dark forest leading up to the mountain’s snowy summit, often, as here, at sunrise. Monadnock, Winter Sunrise is among the last and most successful examples of Thayer’s Monadnock views. The rising, sun-tipped shoulder of the mountain and its snow capped peak beyond are echoed, as if in reflection, by the inversely descending edge of the wooded foreground, which seems bowed by the weight of the massive form above.
Information
1919
North America, United States, New Hampshire, Monadnock Mountain
- "Acquisitions," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 13, no. 2, (1954): p. 62-63., p. 63
- Susan Hobbs, "Nature into art: the landscapes of Abbott Handerson Thayer", American art journal 14, no. 3 (Summer, 1982): p. 4-55., fig. 46
- Dannald Hall and Clifton C. Olds, Winter: published on the occasion of the exhibition, (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1986)., cat. no. 56; p. 104 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 263 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
- Kevin M. Murphy and Abbott Handerson Thayer, "Not theories but revelations": the art and science of Abbott Handerson Thayer, (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2016). , p. 12 (illus.)
