How does this artwork elucidate its Background?
After studying in New York City and Paris, Thayer took a studio in Brooklyn in 1880. He traveled often, summering for the next few years in Nantucket or Pittsfield, Massachusetts; in 1881, he went to Hartford, Connecticut to paint Mark Twain, and in 1882 he spent the winter in a cottage owned by Henry Ward Beecher in Peekskill, New York. In 1883, Thayer rented a home at Cornwell-on-Hudson, and built a studio on James Stillman's property. It was there that he painted two portraits of the sisters, one of Bessie alone, completed in 1883, and the double portrait, which he worked on until January 1884. Together, the paintings are quite different from his previous portraits, which had featured more opulent wardrobes in keeping with the fashionable style of the Paris Salon—an art reviewer had found fault with the "poor taste" of the glamorous finery of Thayer's 1881 Portrait of Mrs. William F. Milton, and thereafter the artist avoided ostentatious dress.Thayer began The Sisters in the summer of 1883. It was the largest portrait he had attempted at the time and the composition was arrived upon only after much trial and error. Thayer wrote:I have spent such an immense amount of their time and mine in experimenting on different poses, always trying to make a pretty handsome thing of each part in each new pose so as not to ascribe the fault to the composition when it really lay at the door of ugliness of the rendering that I have far from done, now, but am full of conviction that it represents progress to say the least.
and laterI have not quite done my big portrait of the two wonderful young women, one of them having been ill, but she is mending. I still hope it will be a respectable picture.
New York City Mark Twain Paris Salon Henry Ward Beecher