WASHINGTON, D.C. - Abbott Handerson Thayer is best known today for his idealized likenesses of winged figures, but as an appealing and informative exhibition of over 60 works at the National Museum of American Art through September 6 reveals, he also created perceptive portraits, landscapes, still lifes and delicate nature studies.

A major figure in the so-called American Renaissance movement, Thayer's work covered a range of turn-of-the-century artistic approaches, from Gilded Age society likenesses to allegorical figures to awe-inspiring mountainscapes.

A strange but gifted individual, full of energy and new visions for art-making, Thayer (1849-1921) dedicated his career to painting "pictures of the highest human soul beauty." A devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, he was a transcendentalist who found purity, truth and beauty in pristine nature.

Combining eccentricities with genius, Thayer merged his dual interest in art and science in his oeuvre, which was permeated with his profound sense of the spiritual. "Thayer's art combines Renaissance idealism with a modern concern for science," says Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art. "He shows us how America in the Gilded Age was poised between a reverence for past traditions and a new empirical approach."

"Abbott Thayer: The Nature of Art" was organized by Richard Murray, senior curator at the National Museum of American Art (NMAA). Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the artist's birth, it is the first major exhibition in three decades to examine the work of this influential, but now nearly forgotten, painter.

Many of the works on view were collected by John Gellatly, one of Thayer's most generous patrons, and later given to what is now the NMAA. Reflecting the high esteem in which Thayer has been held in the art world, other works were drawn from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Addison Gallery of American Art, at Phillips Andover Academy. Important paintings and objects were also loaned by members of the Thayer family.

A companion exhibition, "Winged Figures," will be on view from June 5-February 19, 2000 at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer Gallery of Art, which cannot loan its works. It brings together for the first time in a half century three monumental winged-figure paintings commissioned by Thayer's leading patron, Charles Lang Freer, specifically for the gallery. The highlight will be the familiar "A Virgin" (1893), which sets the artist's daughter Mary leading son Gerald and daughter Gladys, all draped in classical robes, against winglike clouds.

Thayer's work emerged from the American Renaissance, that late Nineteenth Century backlash against a modern world shaped by science and technology, which found inspiration in the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance and classical Greece and Rome. In keeping with those traditions, Thayer became a specialist in portraying the idealized female form.

His ethereal figures, usually swathed in concealing drapery, conveyed high moral and spiritual messages and seemed, by costume and setting, to be removed from the contemporary world. "In...[his] ambition to achieve an aesthetic ideal of the pure, noble and intelligent woman," art historian James K. Kettlewell has observed, "Thayer belonged to what could be identified as a specific school of like-minded American artists within the American Renaissance movement, all of whom were his friends: the sculptors Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the painters Thomas Dewing and George De Forest Brush."

Kettlewell wrote the publication accompanying Transcendent Universe: The Paintings of Abbot Henderson Thayer, at the Hyde collection in Glens Falls, N.Y. in 1996. Hyde Collection curator Randall Suffolk wrote at the time that Thayer's "paintings provide a distinctly American response to the art of painting which, in an age primarily defined by relatively personal, subjective representation, sought to articulate examples of transcendence."

Thayer's work, highly praised by contemporary critics, was eagerly sought by collectors of his time. But over the years it became increasingly difficult for the public and even art scholars to identify with his canvases. Even his accomplished mountainscapes tended to get lost amidst the plethora of other equally fine paintings of the New England landscape. With so much attention focused on the realism of artists such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, Thayer's offbeat art faded into the shadows.

As a result, Thayer has receded from public view in the decades since his death, making this thoughtful and comprehensive display of the breadth of his achievements doubly welcome.

"Thayer is a curious double-figure, a man of extremes and contradictions," according to curator Murray. The manner in which he organized the show underscores how the artist, in Murray's description, "embodied elegance and rusticity, enthusiasm and depression."

The four sections into which "The Nature of Art" is divided demonstrate the range of Thayer's oeuvre and the diversity of his outlooks. "Portraits and Self-Portraits" documents the evolution of the artist's style from elegant early likenesses to later psychological studies. "Angels and Ideal Figures" features Thayer's idiosyncratic paintings of allegorical women. "Still Life and Concealing Coloration" explores his theories and art involving design and color in nature and wildlife. "Landscapes and Mount Monadnock" reflects Thayer's evocations of the scenery around him, especially the awe-inspiring mountain overlooking his home in Dublin, N.H.

Thayer was born into a distinguished old-line Boston family. His father, a physician, moved his family first to Keene, N.H. and later to Brooklyn. Having shown early aptitude for drawing animals, young Thayer studied at the Brooklyn Academy of Design and exhibited work at the National Academy of Design.

In 1875 he married Kate Bloede, daughter of a prominent German emigre intellectual and newspaper editor. The couple left soon thereafter for Paris, where Thayer enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Five children were born over the next decade, of whom three lived beyond infancy. Thayer was deeply devoted to his wife and children.

Returning to America in 1879, Thayer became a professional artist, headquartered in New York, but often moving his residence around. For a time in the 1880s he had a studio in a building also used by Dewing and French. He became a leader in the New York art world and a popular portraitist and painter of traditional landscapes.

Drawing on his French academic training, Thayer used nude or semi-nude figures to evoke the glories of the classical past. His large "Half-Draped Figure" circa 1885, a seated Venus de Milo-like figure with a sultry expression, was clearly designed to make a major artistic statement.

His striking double portrait of "The Sisters" (1884), showing Bessie and Clara Stillman, daughters of banker and art collector James Stillman, suggested a complex familial relationship by means of the unusually close placement of the figures and their pensive expressions.

Somewhat later, employing a visual vocabulary reminiscent of fellow Bostonian John Singleton Copley in the Eighteenth Century, Thayer posed young women in light dresses against dark backgrounds, such as "Portrait of Bessie Price" (1897). This young Irish maid also modeled for a similarly composed likeness, "Young Woman" (1898).

Over time, Thayer's portraits advanced from straightforward depictions of individuals to perceptive character studies, like the insightful "Michael Spartali Stillman," which he began in 1905, then set aside, and completed in 1915. "There are souls emanating out of his likenessses," says Murray, who likens them to the sculptural work of his friend Saint-Gaudens.

Thayer also created a number of self-portraits, starting with elegant, self-confident images and ending with stark, unsparing, personalized studies. Increasingly introspective after his first wife's death in 1891, he probed deeply into his own mental state and personality in later likenesses.

In several self-portraits at the end of his career Thayer presented himself full-face, as a haggard, balding figure, devoid of any softening surrounding elements. These are unsparing, rugged images, in keeping with the rustic persona he adopted at his New Hampshire home.

The illness and early death of Thayer's beloved first wife, Kate, prompted new directions in his art. In the late 1880s, as her depression and tuberculosis worsened, he began to paint their three children in classically-inspired compositions showing them as symbols of beauty and perfection. The spiritual and idealist elements of German philosophy that he acquired through the Bloede family, added to his Yankee transcendental beliefs, consoled him about his wife's fate and prompted his angelic portraits. In Thayer's art, winged women came to represent both spirituality and death, even the triumph of the soul over death.

His first winged figure, "Angel" (1887) was a luminous portrait of his doe-eyed 11 year-old daughter Mary, resplendent in a white dress and bearing enormous white wings. In the tightly-composed "Brother and Sister (Mary and Gerald Thayer)" (1889), she appeared in thoughtful tandem with her sibling. In "Virgin Enthroned"(1891), painted after his wife's death, Mary appeared as a Madonna-like figure watching over her brother and sister.

Several of the elegant gold frames in the exhibition were designed by Thayer's friend, renowned architect Stanford White. They particularly heighten the effect of works such as "Angel" and "Winged Figure" (1889).

The most famous of Thayer's paintings in his lifetime, "Caritas" (1894-95) is another enormous, enigmatic, beautifully painted and composed canvas featuring an idealized mother-and-children triumverate. Much praised in its day, it conveyed messages of solace and hope to turn-of-the-century viewers.

Thayer made no attempt to explain his enigmatic figures, saying only that their wings were meant to create "an exalted atmosphere" that lifted them out of the commonplace. "They come near to us, there is a lovely hint of the human and intimate in them, yet they are not of the earth; they have a mystic air, and glance that fathoms the beyond," summarized one art critic of his day.

Mary Thayer served as the centerpiece for "My Children (Mary, Gerald and Gladys Thayer)" (1893-97), in which she appeared in a virginal white gown towering over her siblings. The artist originally intended this as a monument to Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), whose work Thayer greatly admired. Mary initially held a plaque with the initials "R.L.S." on it, but when told the picture did not seem to have much to do with the late author, Thayer turned the plaque into a laurel wreath and named the painting in honor of his children.

His eventual tribute, the "Stevenson Memorial" (1903), completed a few years later, remains one of his more complex compositions. It shows a bright, winged figure in a white gown seated against an ominously dark background, suggesting angelic goodness surrounded by the shadows of evil and death, themes that Stevenson explored in his writings.

The author's name and coat of arms originally appeared across the top, but Thayer later painted them out, leaving only the word "VAEA," which refers to the mountain in Samoa where Stevenson was buried. The angel is depicted sitting on a rock marking the famed writer's far away grave. Highly popular with critics and the public, the "Stevenson Memorial" traveled to major museums around the country after it was unveiled.

Murray's examination of x-rays and infra-red photographs, have disclosed different compositions and multiple alterations beneath visible layers of paint on several canvases. Murray says this new information will enable scholars to establish relationships among Thayer's paintings and lead to new interpretations of his work.

Thayer's few surviving still lifes owe much to the influence of French Impressionism. As in "Roses" (circa 1896), they usually depict flowers in a bowl or on a table, rendered with subtle colors and diffused light. Created quickly with fluid application of paint, they are a far cry from the painstaking approach he employed to paint angels and portraits, which often took years to complete.

About the time his first wife's health began to fail in the late 1880s, Thayer met Mary Greene, a descendent of John Singleton Copley. She became a student and helped arrange for the Thayer family to summer in rustic Dublin, N.H., where her mother, Mary Copley Greene, was establishing an art and literary colony.

Soon after Kate Thayer's death in 1891, the artist married a long-time family friend, Emma Beach. They became permanent residents of Dublin in 1901.

Turning his back on social conventions, Thayer cultivated the look of a rugged outdoorsman and reveled in the benefits of fresh mountain air. The family lived and he worked in a complex of houses, barns, unheated sleeping huts and gardens. Wild animals were welcomed as household pets in the main house, which was never heated, even in winter.

After dinner, according to artists Cecilia Beaux and Rockwell Kent, who visited Dublin, each member of the household left for his or her individual lean-to in the surrounding forest. In this eccentric ambience, Thayer increasingly turned to contemplative, even puzzling subjects, whether portraits, winged figures or mountain views.

The painter, nonetheless, remained in touch with the world of art and ideas, maintaining a lively correspondence with well-known contemporaries ranging from Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) to President Theodore Roosevelt to patrons Freer and Gellatly.

Instinctively drawn to nature, Thayer found many subjects of interest in the flora and fauna of New Hampshire. His immersion in the natural world and his thorough academic training in color, design and composition led him to study how animals use natural camouflage to conceal themselves from enemies. He concluded that all animal markings, even the most conspicuous - such as flamingos, giraffes and zebras - serve the purpose of concealment.

With his son Gerald, Thayer published his ideas in Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), which detailed the principles of "Countershading," "Ruptive Color and Pattern," and "Mimicry" by which animals disguise themselves.

His ideas were rejected by many, including Roosevelt. The one-time friends exchanged acrimonious letters over the issue, leading to a bitter falling out. Nevertheless, Thayer's theories were adapted during World War I to disguise equipment and soldiers. He was, says Richard Meryman in an excellent article on the subject in Smithsonian Magazine (April 1999), "the father of camouflage."

Thayer's early landscapes, such as "Spring Hillside" (circa 1889) were bright, sunlit, apparently spontaneous images, in contrast to the darker brooding views of his later canvases.

Traveling with his family to St Ives, England, Thayer painted "Cornish Headlands" (1898), which he executed on a site in a matter of hours. The painter called it his favorite canvas, because there was "no Abbott Thayer in it." Most of his paintings, he acknowledged, were worked and reworked for years.

After the turn of the century Thayer focused on Mount Monadnock, the grand outcropping that overlooked his studio and family compound in Dublin. His vision of the majestic mountain's grandeur traced back to the transcendental views of Emerson and Thoreau, who had also stood in awe of the same mountain.

Thayer developed a broad painting style emphasizing fresh, brisk brushwork and thinly painted washes that created the illusion of great distances. Over the years he portrayed the mountain in all seasons, filling each with the personality of that time of year, but came to favor a view of bright winter sun striking the snow-capped peak. This is exemplified by one of the exhibition's highlights, "Monadnock" (circa 1917).

Thayer became a passionate conservationist, funding programs to protect bird sanctuaries, habitats and wildlife up and down the East Coast, and campaigning vigorously to save Mount Monadnock from commercial development.

In culminating paintings of his career, he joined two of his abiding passions - winged figures and natural environments - in canvases which featured angels hovering protectively over areas he sought to save in Florida, on Cape Cod and Mount Monadnock.

"Thayer was working with the modern notion that the key to understanding his paintings is in the process of their creation," says curator Murray, "much like the Abstract Expressionist ideas in the 1950s."

When Thayer died in 1921, John Singer Sargent said, "Too bad he's gone. He was the best of them." Thayer's son scattered his ashes on his beloved Mount Monadnock.

Writing in 1930, the esteemed painter Beaux, who had stayed with the Thayers at their "forest retreat" in Dublin, called Thayer "the peer of Winslow Homer as a revealer of the illusive aspects of Nature, that we have often before us and never really see." She expressed particular admiration for his Mount Monadnock paintings as well as his idealized figures. "The material of his painting, modeling, and the surface of his form were rich in quality," she wrote. "How stimulating is his passage from dream to substance! How commanding his vision!"

Recalling the spartan nature of Thayer's life in his sylvan New Hampshire home and his warm hospitality, Beaux added that "I shall always regret...that I did not hear him in class, for his utterance, by word, was as fine and subtle in its simplicity as was his compelling personality."

In the years around World War I the Metropolitan Museum of Art held memorial exhibitions for art titans who passed away during that era, including Saint-Gaudens, Homer, Eakins, George Bellows, Sargent and, in 1922, Thayer. That high ranking for Thayer has faded in the eight decades since then, but this welcome exhibition - the product of work by the National Museum of American Art - will help restore luster to his reputation.

In the final analysis, Thayer proves to be a skilled, idiosyncratic painter, who bequeathed to posterity enigmatic, idealized figures and evocative mountainscapes that will stand the test of time. Kudos to Murray and the NMAA for giving this neglected artist a renewed day in the sun.

There is no exhibition catalogue, only a modest brochure that barely scratches the surface of the interesting material Murray has developed about Abbott Handerson Thayer. He is, however, working on a book that will fill the void in American art scholarship about this interesting painter.

The National Museum of American Art is at Eighth and G Streets NW in Washington; telephone 202/357-2700.