Polly Thayer Starr, 101; painter included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts' landmark exibition ''A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940
Hyfler/Rosner
November 8, 2006 Wednesday
Paid Notice: Deaths
STARR, POLLY THAYER
STARR--Polly Thayer. The only living painter included in the
Boston Museum of Fine Arts' landmark exibition ''A Studio of
Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870-1940,'' died
peacefully at her Lexington home on August 30. She would
have been 102 today. She attended the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts Boston and studied painting with Philip Hale,
Charles Hawthorne, Harry Wickey, Jean Despujols, Hans
Hoffman and Carl Nelson. Her art is represented in many
museums and universities throughout the country, including
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg Museum in
Cambridge, MA. She leaves two daughters, Victoria Starr of
Hingham, MA and Dinah Starr of Boston. A memorial service
will be held at Cambridge Friends Meeting, Cambridge, MA on
November 11, at 2 PM.
http://www.vosegalleries.com/artists/ArtistWorks.cfm?PieceID=1368
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/thayer95.htm
The Boston Globe
September 03, 2006
HEADLINE: POLLY THAYER STARR, ARTIST, LIFELONG FRIEND TO
MANY; 101
BYLINE: BY BRYAN MARQUARD, GLOBE STAFF
"Ever since I could hold a pencil, I was drawing something,"
Polly Thayer Starr once said.
Charcoal sketches in her childhood gave way to portraits
that range from literal to ethereal; to landscapes
illuminating the spirit of a milieu; to a series of
paintings capturing the life span of a thistle.
"You never achieve what you want," she told a friend late in
life, "but you're always getting nearer to the essence . . .
and that's a search that is all important."
Scion of two New England families who count among their
ancestors Ralph Waldo Emerson and a host of Episcopalian
ministers, she grew up a short walk from the Charles River
in the early 1900s when parts of Boston were so pastoral
that her parents could ride horses in the Fenway nearby.
Born Ethel Randolph Thayer, she was always Polly Thayer in
her work as an artist, even upon marrying in 1933.
Polly Thayer Starr was 101 when she died Wednesday at
Brookhaven at Lexington retirement community. She had lived
there for nearly 10 years after giving Harvard University
the Beacon Street house near Boston Common that had been her
home and studio for six decades.
"She's been my spiritual home," said Susan Sherman of New
York City, who became close with Mrs. Starr about 11 years
ago. "It was a completely life-transforming friendship. She
stretched my soul; she opened the door to God to me. And I
think she had the most considered life of anybody I've ever
known, through poetry and art, and she gave that to anyone
who knew her."
"She leaves behind a legacy on so many levels," said Dorothy
Koval of Lake Elmore, Vt., who had known Mrs. Starr since
growing up with one of her daughters. "Her artwork is
extraordinarily universal. And yet her human relations were
as exceptional as her art. She communicated with people as
so few do."
Lessons in drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts began before
she turned 10. She started acting in her teens and
considered a career in theater.
At 18, she decided to study painting. Through her acting,
though, she met May Sarton who became a lifelong friend. A
portrait she painted of the writer is now in the collection
at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum.
Beginning in 1923, she spent years studying in art schools
and privately in Boston, Provincetown, New York, Madrid, and
Paris. In 1929 the National Academy of Design in New York
awarded her the Julius Hallgarten Prize for "Circles," a
portrait of a nude woman facing away.
The following year, when she turned 27, she was awarded the
gold medal at the Boston Tercentenary Exhibition for a
self-portrait, "Interval." Those early successes inspired
many to commission her to paint their portraits.
Meanwhile, she fell in love with Donald C. Starr, a lawyer
who had studied with her brother at Harvard, and struggled
with balancing her desires to marry and to devote herself to
art.
In 1933, as he sailed around the world with friends in a
schooner he had built, she traveled to Genoa, Italy, where
they married, then honeymooned in Paris.
"I was pretty gun-shy of marriage when it would mean giving
up painting. . . . It took a long time to make up my mind,"
she said 11 years ago in an interview with the Smithsonian
Institution.
In 1936, before they started having children, she painted
the striking portrait of Sarton that is now at the Fogg Art
Museum.
"She was great fun," Mrs. Starr said of Sarton, who died in
1995. "She could make anything come alive for you. I've
never known anybody who had quite that quality of
imagination."
In turn, Sarton wrote that Mrs. Starr was "the most
unaffectedly humble person about her work that she had ever
known," said Sherman, who edited the writer's letters for
publication.
When Mrs. Starr began raising her children, the family split
its time between Beacon Street and a farm in Hingham, and
the demands on her increased. She introduced her children to
art, literature, and a sense of wonder.
"She was always reading aloud we would read aloud to each
other," said her younger daughter, Dinah of East Boston.
"She loved poetry. She would memorize enormous amounts of
poetry."
"She could pat bumblebees," said her other daughter,
Victoria of Hingham. "While he was on the flower, she would
take her finger and stroke his fur and his wings would buzz
like mad, and he wouldn't fly away until she stopped. It
always seemed to me the equivalent of a cat's purr."
Koval said that to visit the family was to enter "a whole
different world. She would read us poetry and Shakespeare on
end. And she was always sketching. She has hundreds of her
children at every moment."
"I've read somewhere that Cezanne didn't go to his mother's
funeral because it would have taken a day from his
painting," Mrs. Starr told the Smithsonian, laughing at the
thought. "It got to be that kind of choice for me,
practically."
She became a Quaker and ventured away from home, seeking new
inspiration. She attended wrestling matches and was invited
into an operating room to watch surgery, telling a friend
that "to see the living organs pushing up uncovered out of a
woman's body . . . I forgot everything in the wonder of it."
Stepping away from her training in the Boston School
approach to painting, her work over the decades slipped the
bounds of easy categorization. The gift of a jeweler's loupe
opened vistas into the lives of the insects and the flowers.
Then, in her 70s, she developed glaucoma and macular
degeneration. Before completely losing her sight, her final
works in her late 80s were drawings of a thistle and a
diaphanous self-portrait that seemed to place her both in
this world and the next.
Her husband died in 1992. She gave up the Beacon Street
house a few years later and donated most of Weir River Farm,
her family's property in Hingham, to the Trustees of
Reservations conservation group for public use.
In 2001, she was the only living artist whose work was part
of the Museum of Fine Arts show "A Studio of Her Own: Women
Artists in Boston 1870-1940."
In the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Hingham are two
portraits painted by Mrs. Starr: one is her mother and the
other is a former minister. A memorial service will be held
there on Tuesday at 11 a.m. Services will be scheduled later
in Friends Meeting in Cambridge and in Brookhaven at
Lexington. Her daughters and friends plan to borrow her
works from museums and private collections for a
retrospective show in the future.
Though Mrs. Starr's sight was gone in the final years, her
sense of humor never departed.
"Even in extreme old age, when the four of us got together,
we giggled a lot," Victoria said of visiting her mother with
her sister and Koval.
While taking daily walks, Mrs. Starr would ask a companion
to read poetry aloud so she could continue to memorize
lines, stanzas, and entire poems. The pull of creativity,
she told the Smithsonian, never ceases.
"It's the Hound of Heaven," she said with a chuckle. "It's
always after you."