Portrait of a Lady by Theodora W. Thayer

This is Theodora W. Thayer's "Portrait of a Lady," painted around 1898. It is not a painting on paper or canvas. It is watercolor on a thin sheet of ivory, small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Look at the woman's face. The warmth in her skin is not just pigment. Light passes through the thin washes of watercolor, strikes the ivory beneath, and reflects back. The ivory itself becomes a light source. This is why miniature painters prized the material, it gave flesh a luminosity that opaque grounds could never replicate.

Thayer studied in Boston under Joseph DeCamp before teaching at the New York School of Art and the Art Students League. She was a founding member of the American Society of Miniature Painters, an organization that fought to have this intimate art taken seriously at a time when large-scale oil painting dominated American exhibitions.

Her wide-brimmed hat dates the sitter precisely to the late 1890s. The white shirtwaist was the uniform of the "New Woman." Thayer died young, in 1905, at thirty-seven. Her portrait of the poet Bliss Carman was later called one of the memorable achievements in American miniature painting. This unnamed lady, glowing quietly from a sliver of ivory, reminds us of the rest of her lost body of work.