Under the Trees (Number 2) hails from the final years of Maurice Brazil Prendergast’s life, when he settled down at his Washington Square studio in New York City and produced the most mature paintings of his career.
The fully realized majestic oils of Predergast’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 had taken his final trip abroad to France in 1914, a trip which likely served as inspiration for the present work. Although the setting and figures here lack specificity, the subject of women and children at leisure in a park against the backdrop of placid blue water suggests the Côte d'Azur more so than it does the Hudson River.
Figures by the sea recurred time and again in Prendergast’s oeuvre, likely inspired in part by the work of the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne (see figure 1). After one of his many trips to France, Prendergast wrote: “Cézanne gets the most wonderful color… And he had a watercolor exhibition late in the spring which was to me perfectly marvelous. He left everything to the imagination… I was somewhat bewildered when I first got over here, but I think Cézanne will influence me more than the others. I think so now” (Exh. Cat., Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College Museum of Art, Maurice Prendergast, 1990, p. 25).
The present composition also echoes Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in many ways: staccato brush strokes, flattened pictorial space, solidity of form, lack of specificity, even the red umbrella at center (see figure 2). Both artist depict their figures with timelessness and classical monumentality that could only be gained from observation of ancient statuary and Renaissance painting in Europe. Seurat once wrote “I want to make modern people, in their essential traits, move about as they do on those friezes.” The same can be said of Prendergast, who here eliminates almost all negative space and seems almost to suspend movement.
Although Under the Trees (Number 2) is figurative, close inspection reveals a degree of abstraction. Prendergast's loose brushwork, non-naturalistic colors and elongated, flattened forms together create a dynamically patterned and textured surface. The absence of negative space or traditional perspective brings the viewer’s focus to that surface, where a rough patchwork of muted jewel tones takes on a life and energy of its own.
Ever since 1971, this work has been held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of Art, where it was exhibited and published widely.