Brother and Sister (Mary and Gerald Thayer)

About this artwork

This work portrays Abbott Thayer's children one year after their mother's hospitalization for "melancholia," or severe depression. Kate Thayer became physically ill while hospitalized, and Thayer wrote to a friend that her physical deterioration would not be so horrible "were her soul visible" (Anderson, Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1982). Thayer captured the sadness and worry of this difficult period in Mary's heavy-lidded, watery eyes and in Gerald’s searching expression. They look like a modern...