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Maurice Prendergast

Who Is Maurice Prendergast?

Maurice Prendergast (1858 – 1924) was an American Post-Impressionist artist whose work was influenced by Fauvism, Impressionism, Pointillism, Post-Impressionism, and Realism.

Education and Travel

Prendergast wanted to be an artist from a young age, but he initially made a living lettering show cards for the theater. Unlike some other artists who began their artistic studies early, Prendergast was unable to afford formal art training or foreign travel until he was in his thirties. By the time he enrolled in the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi in Paris in 1891, dramatic changes in the art world were revolutionizing French painting. (NGA)

Growing up in the South End, Boston, he was apprenticed as a youth to a commercial artist. The apprenticeship exposed him to the brightly colored, flat patterning  that characterized his highly personal and easily identifiable style in maturity.   Radically simplified and presented in boldly contrasted flat areas of bright, jewel tones, his forms almost look like mosaics or tapestries. When not at work, Prendergast studied mechanical drawing and attended free evening art classes. Art Story

According to the National Gallery of Art,

“Returning to Boston in 1895, Prendergast joined his brother Charles in his recently established framing business. He gradually began to build a reputation as a painter, initially concentrating on watercolors because the materials required were less expensive than those needed for oils. A pronounced emphasis on surface pattern, which would become a hallmark of his mature work, was evident from his earliest works.” (NGA)

European Influences

Boston, Paris, and Venice – these were all locations where Prendergast had the opportunity to meet other artists who influenced the development of his own artistic style.  

“Prendergast drew inspiration from the work of European Post Impressionists, and he was a leading figure in introducing these new concepts and styles to American audiences. He was particularly interested in color and his use of bold pigments make a vibrant statement throughout his work, highlighting emotional and pictorial elements.”

Art Story

Initially, Prendergast was influenced most by the works of Edouard Manet and  American painter James McNeill Whistler, but he soon found inspiration from other sources, most notably Paul Cézanne and the Nabis painters –  Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Like them, Prendergast found his subjects in the everyday life of Parisian parks and streets as well as in the colorful scenes at nearby resorts.(NGA) In Central Park, for example,

“Prendergast captured the park’s festive energy on a summer day and suggested, with broad horizontal bands, the tripartite traffic system that accommodated carriages, horses with riders, and pedestrians. … Prendergast’s dense pigments, juxtapositions of complementary colors, and whirls of form indicate the influence upon him of contemporary Synchromist painting.”

The Met

Prendergast’s Legacy

“Maurice Prendergast played a key role in the development of Modernism in America. His ability to absorb and adapt the tenets of European Modernism into his own distinctly color-focused style introduced the American public and other artists to Post Impressionism. Whilst his own work retained strong European influences, he gave subsequent generations of American artists the opportunity to take and develop his ideas into a more specifically American style.

Art Story

As highlighted by ROBERTA SMITH in a 1990 New York Times Review, “Prendergast comes across as an American original, an artist who eagerly absorbed the latest in French painting without losing his head. This is rare … when so many American painters produced belated reprises of French Impressionism. And it is all the more impressive considering that he was a man of limited education who supported himself as a commercial artist until he was 32 years old.”

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Details

• Central Park
• Maurice Brazil Prendergast (American, St. John’s, Newfoundland, 1858–1924 New  York
• Date:  ca. 1914–15
• Medium:  Oil on canvas
• Dimensions:  20 3/4 x 27 in. (52.7 x 68.6 cm)
• Credit Line:  George A. Hearn Fund, 1950
• Timelines   The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.-present

Sources

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Central Park by Maurice Prendergast”, Web July 20, 2018, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11804
• Burke, Doreen Bolger, American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864, “Maurice Prendergast” pp.335 – 347, Luhrs, Kathleen, ed., (1980), Web July 22, 2018, https://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=73XrWkYDA-sC#v=onepage&q&f=true
• National Gallery of Art, “Maurice Prendergast”, Web July 20, 2018, https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.5270.html
• Art Story, “Maurice Prendergast”, Web July 20, 2018, https://www.theartstory.org/artist-prendergast-maurice.htm
• Roberta Smith, “Review/Art; In the Sun-Dappled World of Maurice Prendergast” in The New York Times, Archives 1990, Web July 20, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/15/arts/review-art-in-the-sun-dappled-world-of-maurice-prendergast.html?pagewanted=all
• Wikipedia contributors, “Maurice Prendergast,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maurice_Prendergast&oldid=840101489 (accessed July 20, 2018).

Read More

• American Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born between 1846 and 1864
• American Painting in the Twentieth Century
• Masterpieces of American Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Maurice Prendergast at Art Story
• Maurice Prendergast At Sunnyside

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