Polly Thayer Starr

Polly Thayer (Starr) (1904–2006) was a Boston painter and pastel artist. When she was still in her twenties she became known for portraits and figure compositions in the tradition of the Boston School, but took a more Modernist approach after leaving academia. She became increasingly interested in conveying the invisible essences of landscape, flowers and living creatures as her career developed, and was noted for the skilled draftsmanship which provided the substructure of her work.

Named Ethel Randolph Thayer after her mother, the artist was the daughter of Harvard Law School Dean Ezra Ripley Thayer and Ethel Randolph Thayer, and granddaughter of legal scholar James Bradley Thayer. The love of exactitude brought out by her early upbringing in this vigorously intellectual family was tempered by the spiritual heritage of her Transcendentalist forebears, among whom was Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Although she signed some of her early paintings Ethel Thayer, she had been known as Polly since childhood, and by the end of the 1920s generally signed her work Polly Thayer. She continued to use Polly Thayer as her brush name after she was married, although in 1967 she changed her name legally from Ethel Randolph Starr to Polly Thayer Starr. Toward the end of her career she chose to identify herself professionally as Polly Thayer (Starr), but never used that name as a signature.

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, CT, and after graduation embarked with her mother and brother on a tour of the Orient which culminated in her witnessing the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923, an event she viewed as a turning point in her perception of life.

That autumn Thayer entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she studied figure drawing with Hale and portrait painting with Leslie Prince Thompson for about a year and a half, when she left to study privately with Hale. While still under Hale’s tutelage she painted a large nude, Circles, which in 1929 was awarded the National Academy of Design's coveted Julius Hallgarten Prize. She also studied in 1924 with Charles W. Hawthorne, who “keyed up the palette a lot” with his outdoor classes in Provincetown.

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