Maurice Brazil Prendergast 1858 - 1924

Charles Prendergast, 1924 (the artist's brother)
Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Lesley G. Shaefer, 1927
Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York, 1957
Mr. Ralph and Mrs. Louise Ritter, St. Louis, Missouri, 1957
ACA Galleries, New York, 1989
Acquired by the present owners from the above, 1996

Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990, no. 500a, p. 810, illustrated

Very good condition, lined; under UV: no apparent inpainting.
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The Seashore dates from the last decade of Maurice Prendergast's career, when he continued to refine his highly individual artistic vision, which moved steadily closer to abstraction.  Following his final visit to Paris in 1914, Prendergast limited his work to large-scale canvases, emphasizing the flatness of the pictorial plane with frieze-like arrangements of figures in idyllic holiday settings at the seashore or in the park.  Unlike the specific sites around Boston, Paris and Venice depicted in earlier years, the locations of most of Prendergast's late works are unidentified.  Oils such as The Seashore, with its familiar procession of brightly clad figures strolling along the shore and dotting the surf, rework earlier compositions, reflecting the many years Prendergast spent observing the leisure class on holiday in New England and Europe.  Nancy Mowll Mathews observes, "The late idyllic paintings, with their visible signs of Prendergast's ceaseless attempt to improve his art, reveal an essential feature of Prendergast as an artist.  He came to his profession without the advantage of family connections or wealth, but with a solid background in the virtues of hard work and progressive thinking.  His talent gave him the tools to succeed in commercial art and as a view painter early in his career; his innate attraction to new ideas allowed him to move on to modernist circles and to play a part in the cultural revolution of the early twentieth century.  Even when he restricted himself to a single idyllic message of peace and harmony late in his life, he worked to improve the expression in each one even if it meant dispensing with want went on before.  His never-ending pursuit of a new solution gave him the courage to move beyond each success and create works that continually surprise and satisfy.  For this he was recognized by his contemporaries and continues to be valued by posterity" (Maurice Prendergast, 1990, p. 38). 

An idiosyncratic figure in the history of American art, Prendergast existed on the periphery of the major artistic movements of his day and dedicated his career to developing his own distinctive Post-Impressionist style.  His work was strongly influenced by the work of successive generations of French avant garde painters—from Seurat and Signac to the circle of the Nabis to Cézanne, Matisse and the Fauves—which he encountered at exhibitions during his extensive travels in Europe.  Richard J. Wattenmaker writes, "These fully realized majestic oils of Prendergast's last decade are the culmination of more than thirty years of patient and determined exploration, trial and error, wholly personal variations on subjects that have captivated the most subtle and sophisticated minds of the Western tradition since the dawn of the Renaissance.  Prendergast's comprehensive experiments within this humanistic tradition bring to bear his unique adaptations of ideas from both East and West.  If modern painting is primarily about extending the boundaries of color and color relations, Maurice Prendergast has a stature that guarantees him an important place in the pantheon with the masters he so admired and whose ideas he so richly repaid" (Maurice Prendergast, 1994, pp. 143, 145).