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Lot Essay
Considered the first American to champion the modern art of Paul Cezanne in the United States, Maurice Brazil Prendergast found profound inspiration from the Post-Impressionist masters. Despite his self-taught background, their work played a significant role in his painting career following a pivotal trip to Paris in 1907. Prendergast's works employ similar stylistic innovations of the progressive European artists, particularly Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Georges Seurat. Drawing inspiration from Matisse’s lyrical planes of bright colors and Cezanne’s flattened perspective, Prendergast “used only what he needed, and transformed what he borrowed into his own image” (C. Clark, N.M. Mathews and G. Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast and Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990, p. 22). As a result, he developed a distinctive and personal style, epitomized by the present work, that makes him one of most modern artists working during this period. An impressive large-scale example of one of Prendergast’s most popular themes, Summer is comparable in subject and size to works in public collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown.
Painted circa 1918-1923, Summer exhibits Prendergast's predilection for capturing glimpses of picturesque crowds leisurely strolling along the tranquil New England shoreline. After his final travels abroad in 1914, Prendergast frequently summered in towns such as Annisquam and Gloucester and Westport among others, taking his surroundings as his primary subject. Such locations likely inspired the idyllic summer day portrayed in the present work. Although the artist did not paint en plein air, his works were based upon sketches made outdoors from direct observation. During the winter months, Prendergast worked up large oils like Summer in his New York City studio. Of these large scenes, Walter Pach, a critic of modern art and friend of Prendergast writes: “When he comes nearest to creating a new world is in his joyous fancy of a summer all of light—clear and radiant. His picture is real for us and consonant with our experience...” (as quoted in N.M. Mathews, The Art of Leisure: Maurice Prendergast in the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 47).
Here, Prendergast employs a flattened perspective and bright, Fauvist colorism, which recalls such iconic works as Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-1906, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and Cezanne’s Pastorale (1870, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Prendergast’s time in France exposed him to these stylistic movements and informed much of his later output. Milton Brown writes of Prendergast’s output from this period: “The gradual development of Prendergast’s late style, which was essentially ‘synthetic,’ may be a belated response to his earliest experiences in Paris in the early 1890s, when both Symbolism and Pointillism were current…it is difficult to conceive of Prendergast’s touche technique, which surfaces in many different guises from the early small dots and balloon spots to the later daubs and dashes, without some conscious reference to Seurat, Signac and Pointillism” (op. cit., 1990, pp. 21-22).
As seen in Summer, the artist explored realms of abstraction in his later years, in addition to Post-Impressionist techniques. Brown explains, “In these late paintings, Prendergast returns to an earlier three-band horizontality, but the bands are often firmly interlocked by a trellis of vertical forms. The brushstrokes become larger and bolder, and they take on an abstract quality apart from the underlying forms they are supposed to define, moving in independent directions, and varying in size and shape. But, while obscuring and overriding those forms, they succeed in unifying the pictorial surface” (ibid., p. 22).
Indeed, painted with a mirthful diaspora of colors and incredibly impressive in scale, Summer embodies the artist’s best output from this period. Prendergast’s bold brushwork, vibrant color and dynamic compositional design combine to create a striking modernist image of a bustling summer day in New England.
Painted circa 1918-1923, Summer exhibits Prendergast's predilection for capturing glimpses of picturesque crowds leisurely strolling along the tranquil New England shoreline. After his final travels abroad in 1914, Prendergast frequently summered in towns such as Annisquam and Gloucester and Westport among others, taking his surroundings as his primary subject. Such locations likely inspired the idyllic summer day portrayed in the present work. Although the artist did not paint en plein air, his works were based upon sketches made outdoors from direct observation. During the winter months, Prendergast worked up large oils like Summer in his New York City studio. Of these large scenes, Walter Pach, a critic of modern art and friend of Prendergast writes: “When he comes nearest to creating a new world is in his joyous fancy of a summer all of light—clear and radiant. His picture is real for us and consonant with our experience...” (as quoted in N.M. Mathews, The Art of Leisure: Maurice Prendergast in the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 47).
Here, Prendergast employs a flattened perspective and bright, Fauvist colorism, which recalls such iconic works as Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-1906, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) and Cezanne’s Pastorale (1870, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Prendergast’s time in France exposed him to these stylistic movements and informed much of his later output. Milton Brown writes of Prendergast’s output from this period: “The gradual development of Prendergast’s late style, which was essentially ‘synthetic,’ may be a belated response to his earliest experiences in Paris in the early 1890s, when both Symbolism and Pointillism were current…it is difficult to conceive of Prendergast’s touche technique, which surfaces in many different guises from the early small dots and balloon spots to the later daubs and dashes, without some conscious reference to Seurat, Signac and Pointillism” (op. cit., 1990, pp. 21-22).
As seen in Summer, the artist explored realms of abstraction in his later years, in addition to Post-Impressionist techniques. Brown explains, “In these late paintings, Prendergast returns to an earlier three-band horizontality, but the bands are often firmly interlocked by a trellis of vertical forms. The brushstrokes become larger and bolder, and they take on an abstract quality apart from the underlying forms they are supposed to define, moving in independent directions, and varying in size and shape. But, while obscuring and overriding those forms, they succeed in unifying the pictorial surface” (ibid., p. 22).
Indeed, painted with a mirthful diaspora of colors and incredibly impressive in scale, Summer embodies the artist’s best output from this period. Prendergast’s bold brushwork, vibrant color and dynamic compositional design combine to create a striking modernist image of a bustling summer day in New England.