Introduction

Abstract

The brother-sister bond held a prominent place in the nineteenth-century American imagination, and it played an important role in the shaping of national ideologies and culture. American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer’s 1889 portrait “Brother and Sister” (figure I.1) wonderfully captures the complex place of the sibling bond in American cultural history, as it reveals the nuances of the private and personal significance of the brother-sister bond on the one hand, while engaging, on the other hand, the artist’s public anxieties about the decline of his national culture. Thayer’s own children, Mary and Gerald, modeled for this portrait, during a sorrowful period when their mother was hospitalized for severe depression, shortly before she would die of tuberculosis. From the time of his wife’s illness and especially after her death, Thayer turned to his three surviving children, Mary, Gerald, and Gladys, for emotional succor, a personal history that is reflected in his extensive use of the children as models for his prolific portrait output.1 Whether posing for the several Angel portraits for which the artist would become most famous, naturalistic Virgin Mary scenes, or ideal human figures, Thayer’s children served as his main study, suiting his various subjects and scenes and revealing his artistic, psychological, and social anxieties.KeywordsSibling PairNational UnionNational CrisisAmerican ImaginationFamily GovernanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.