Focus on this artwork and analyze the Description.
Dressed in black and set against a muted green background, the sisters are seen in a doorway. Bessie stands in front, her arms down and hands clasped in front of her. Clara stands directly behind, and wraps her left hand around Bessie's waist while resting her upraised right hand on the entryway's frame. The sisters are noble in comportment and remote in expression. The unusual positioning of their figures implies a complex and intimate relationship.
Though the overall impression is successful, the painting has been faulted for lapses in execution. The drawing of Bessie's right forearm is meager, Clara's left hand is weak, and the brushwork throughout is labored. Commissioned portraits were expected to be more highly finished, and although The Sisters was given a place of honor at the Society of American Artists exhibition of 1884, it received harsh criticism for the perceived "flimsiness" of its details. Technical faults notwithstanding, the nobility of its composition has been compared to the portraits of Thomas Eakins.For their elegance and restrained tones, Thayer's portraits of the mid-1880s, and particularly The Sisters, have been cited as influential to the work of his younger colleague Dennis Miller Bunker.
Thomas Eakins Dennis Miller Bunker left Society of American Artists