Emma Homan Thayer (1842–1908) was a 19th-century American botanical artist and author of books about native wildflowers. She also wrote several novels.

Biography

Emma Homan was born in New York City on Feb. 13, 1842, the daughter of George Wand and Emma Homan. Her father was a businessman and the first person to operate omnibuses on Broadway in New York. A portrait of her as a very young child (ca. 1843) by the painter John Bradley is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was painted in the village of Wading River on Long Island. Her father moved the family to Omaha, Nebraska, when she was around 15, and a few years later, in 1860, she married George A. Graves, who went on to work for the war department in Washington, D.C. They had two children, Amy (1861–1892) and Byron (b. 1862). Emma Homan Graves was widowed after only four years of marriage, at which point she decided to pursue higher education. She attended

Rutgers Female College Rutgers Female College was chartered in April 1838 under the name Rutgers Female Institute. Its first home was at 262–66 Madison Street on the Lower East Side of New York City, on land lent by William B. Crosby, one of the first incorporators. ...

for a time and then enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where she studied painting. She became one of the earliest members of the

Art Students League of New York The Art Students League of New York is an art school at 215 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has historically been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists. Although artists may stu ...

. Her figure paintings and still lives were exhibited in New York and elsewhere and won two gold medals. In 1877 she married again, to Elmer A. Thayer of Massachusetts, who was a manager for hotels on the Denver and Rio Grande lines. They moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she continued her career as a painter. With Thayer, she had two more children, both of whom died rather young (before 1899). In 1882, they moved to Colorado, where she shifted from figure painting to botanical art, focusing on wild flowers native to America depicted in natural settings. Her first book was ''Wild Flowers of Colorado'' (1885), illustrated with 24

chromolithographs Chromolithography is a method for making multi-colour prints. This type of colour printing stemmed from the process of lithography, and includes all types of lithography that are printed in colour. When chromolithography is used to reproduce ph ...

of her watercolors accompanying a description of her travels throughout the state. It was followed two years later by ''Wild Flowers of the Pacific Coast'', which was similarly framed around a travel narrative. The flowers in both books are painted in a lively, impressionistic style without great attention to scientific detail. Part of the appeal of Thayer's books stemmed from the first-person, diaristic style she used to recount her camping trips and mild adventures in pursuit of unusual flowers in sometimes rugged terrain. In her book on Colorado wild flowers, Thayer was the first person to report that giant helleborine can be found in that state. Thayer iris-WFC

In the same year that ''Wild Flowers of Colorado'' was published, claims were made that Thayer had based some of her watercolors for the book on sketches made by a Colorado Springs botanical artist,

Alice Stewart Hill Alice Stewart Hill (pen name, AAS, ASH; born Alice Amelia Stewart; c. 1851–January 10, 1896) was an American artist who created paintings and illustrations. Her specialty was creating works of art based upon the flowers of Colorado. Her work was ...

, rather than on her own drawings. While these claims were strongly contested by people who had actually accompanied Thayer on her trips and seen her at work, it emerged that Thayer had bought some flower studies from Hill and may have borrowed some compositional elements from Hill's work. There was no lawsuit, however, so the extent of Thayer's borrowing from Hill was never fully settled. In 1889, Thayer published a new edition of ''Wild Flowers of Colorado'' under the title ''Wild Flowers of the Rocky Mountains''; the only changes were to the cover and title page. It has been suggested that this alteration was made so that it would not compete so directly with Alice Hill's 1886 book ''The Procession of Flowers in Colorado''. Thayer also wrote several novels, including ''An English-American'' (1889), ''Petronilla, the Sister'' (1898), ''A Legend of Glenwood Springs'' (1900), and ''Dorothy Scudder's Science'' (1901). All of her books sold well, and many of them went through numerous editions. However, ''The Mortgage Foreclosed: A Story of the Farm'' (1890?), though written by an E.H. Thayer, is apparently not her work. She stated that the author of that novel had used her initials as well as some of her characters in order to market it, falsely, as "Mrs Thayer's new book". Thayer died in Denver, Colorado, in 1908.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Thayer, Emma Homan 1842 births 1908 deaths 19th-century American novelists 19th-century American artists 19th-century American women artists 19th-century American women writers Art Students League of New York alumni American botanical illustrators National Academy of Design members Rutgers University alumni Novelists from New York (state)