Polly Thayer Starr
She became increasingly interested in conveying the invisible essences of landscape, flowers and living creatures as her career developed, and she was noted for the skilled draftsmanship that provided the substructure of her work.
[2][3] She was born into a wealthy and distinguished family, "of the best New England ancestry",[2] and when she came of age the Boston Post called her "one of the Back Bay's foremost society girls".
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, Connecticut, and after graduation embarked with her mother and brother on a tour of the Far East, where they witnessed the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, an event she viewed as a turning point in her perception of life.
[3][4][7] Royal Cortissoz, the conservative art critic of the New York Herald Tribune encouraged her to visit Europe and learn from the master artists of the past.
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 later years she studied 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.
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".
[10] The 1936 portrait of May Sarton in the Harvard Art Museums,[11] evinces a different aspect of this new freedom of expression, as Thayer found herself experimenting with portraiture unconstrained by tonal values.
Impatient for home after 17 months,[c] Starr interrupted his sailing journey in Singapore on November 17, 1933, and continued west on a Dutch steamer through the Suez Canal to Genoa, where he and Thayer wed in a civil ceremony.
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.
In 1981 the Friends Journal published her essay “On Seeing,”[18] 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.
