Artist Results

record 1 of 1

Maurice Prendergast Painter American (Newfoundland, 1859 - 1924, New York) View objects by this artist.

Maurice Prendergast, America’s first modernist, lived in Boston, the son of an Irish odd-job man. Prendergast began to draw at an early age and while still in his teens worked as a painter’s apprentice. In 1886, he and his brother Charles traveled to Europe on a cattle boat. In 1891, Prendergast again journeyed overseas, this time to study at the famed Académie Julian in Paris. While in Paris, he encountered the latest work of the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, and the Nabis. It was not until he was forty that his own work began to receive widespread recognition. He had his first New York exhibition in 1900 at the influential Macbeth Galleries and was later associated with The Eight—the group of artists whose famous 1908 exhibition marked a groundbreaking departure from academic traditions. Yet Prendergast’s pretty explosions of color and poetic design tend to set him apart from his peers, whose urban realism was of a grittier, prosaic sort. (Whitney Museum of Art)

Maurice Brazil Prendergast was born in Newfoundland. He had a twin sister who died when he was seventeen, and a younger brother, Charles, five years his junior. In 1868, the Prendergast family immigrated to Boston where Maurice entered the public school system. After leaving grammar school at age fourteen, Maurice got a job in a dry goods store. Not much information is available about Prendergast's early years, but it is known that he participated in mechanical and industrial drawing classes in the public schools, and later studied at several Free Evening Drawing Schools in Boston where he followed "a comprehensive curriculum" and passed examinations. He was apprenticed in lettering "store cards" used for advertising and according to U.S. census records in Boston, he was listed variously as a designer, painter and decorator in the early 1800s. It is assumed that he spent time viewing the collections at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to gain an awareness of contemporary painting of the time, and, according to his brother Charles's recollection, Maurice was engrossed in sketching the countryside around Boston.

In the early 1890s, Maurice and Charles had saved enough money to travel to Paris where Maurice stayed for three and a half years. The brothers studied at several schools, absorbing the influences of contemporary French art. Maurice especially explored the discoveries of light and color of the Impressionists. Larry Curry writes that during Prendergast's half-dozen trips abroad he preferred to work in the open air, noting in quick vital sketches the movement and mood of the boulevards. He was interested primarily in ordinary people in public scenes and "no other artist equaled his ability to extract the flowing patterns of color from the moving throng."1 Returning to Boston, Maurice began a pattern of exhibiting his work in group shows and solo exhibitions in private galleries and museums across the country. His work was generally well received with critically positive reviews that served to reinforce his growing reputation. Biographer Richard J. Wattenmaker writes of Prendergast's watercolors of 1896, ". . . concision of detail and pervasive colorfulness is evidence of Prendergast's increased proficiency with the watercolor medium."2

According to biographer Nancy M. Mathews:

". . . the Prendergast brothers were charming, attractive people. Both were slight of build; Maurice was five feet six inches tall and had gray hair by the age of forty. A friend who knew them somewhat later said, 'they were odd and wonderful people, Mr. Maurice and Charley. They always looked so clean and jaunty.'"3
When the Prendergasts moved to a studio in Boston in 1903, they had adopted a practical routine that allowed Maurice maximum freedom to paint while Charles devoted his time to their frame-making enterprise--often with Maurice's help if a deadline had to be met. Maurice exhibited his work widely and frequently, most notably with Robert Henri and The Eight in 1908 (none of the seventeen paintings submitted by Prendergast were sold, and one critic wrote that his work looked for all the world like an explosion in a color factory), and in the now famous Armory Show of 1913. Henry Adams writes:
"At the time of the Armory Show in 1913, Maurice Prendergast stood out as the most modern and formally advanced artist in America, the first American painter to absorb the achievements of the Post-Impressionists such as Bonnard, Vuillard, and Cézanne, and the only one to eliminate illusionistic space and concentrate on color and form. Prendergast's art, however, while modernist in tendency, was not based on mental lucubration but on an almost childish delight in color and decorative effects. Charles Hovey Pepper, the Boston artist who painted the only known portrait of Prendergast, once remarked, 'Of all the men of genius I have known, Maurice Prendergast had the simplest manner. In conversation he showed the same naive charm that is inherent in the lovely magic of his work.'"4
Maurice made what would be his last trip to France in April, 1914, and in the fall of that year, the Prendergasts moved to New York where they were in contact with other artists and were on good terms with the important collectors and collections in this country. In a Prendergast exhibition catalogue, Donna Seldon writes:
"Prendergast's watercolors . . . represent a record of . . . public life as seen by an artist whose view of the world of art was uniquely his own. For Prendergast, art consisted of color, pattern, balance, and movement; he chose to paint crowded beaches, piazzas, and parks because they offered those elements. Intellectual choice liberated him from the impressionist constriction of creating a record of nature. Thus, these pictures document the time in which they were produced and reflect the specific sensibility of the eye that saw and the hand that painted them."5
At the time of his death at age sixty-six, Prendergast, who was gravely ill in a New York hospital, received a telegram informing him of a one-thousand dollar prize and bronze medal from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. His response is said to have been, "I'm glad they've found out I'm not crazy, anyway."6
References:

1. Larry Curry, Eight American Masters of Watercolor, exhibition catalogue (New York, NY: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1968), n.p.
2. Richard Wattenmaker, Maurice Prendergast (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 35.
3. Nancy Mowll Mathews, Maurice Prendergast (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Musem of Art, 1990), 16.
4. Henry Adams, American Drawings and Watercolors in the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 129.
5. Donna, Seldin, The Remembered Image, Prendergast Watercolors 1896-1906 (New York, NY: Universe/Coe Kerr Gallery, 1986), 12.
6. Wattenmaker, Maurice Prendergast, 147.


Your current search criteria is: Maurice Prendergast