The Beach and Along the Sea with Boat and People (a double sided painting on paper), Circa 1898-1899
Maurice Prendergast was an American artist known for his loosely brushed watercolors of landscapes and bustling city streets. Applied in a patchwork of bright colors, Prendergast observed each scene and recorded it with the idiosyncratic notations seen in his Central Park (1901). “We cannot invent ideas, we can only gather some of those in circulation since the beginning of the world,” he once reflected. “We endow them with the color and form of our own time.” Born on October 10, 1858 in St. John’s, Canada, he moved with his family to Boston at the age of 10. As a young man, Prendergast worked at a grocery store while enrolled in free art classes in the evening. By the age of 28, he was employed as a card designer in Boston, where he first developed his love of watercolors. The artist travelled to Paris in 1891, where he attended both the Atelier Colarosssi and the Académie Julian. Here, he was introduced to the works of Édouard Vuillard, Paul Cézanne, and others. Prendergast had absorbed a number of European influences by the time he began exhibiting alongside the American painters Robert Henri and William Glackens. In 1914, he settled in New York, where he enjoyed the acclaim of both peers and collectors. The artist died on February 1, 1924 in New York, NY. Today, Prendergast’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.