Two Hunters on Horseback and Deer in Landscape

Two Hunters on Horseback and Deer in Landscape exemplifies Charles Prendergast's emulation of traditional carved and polychromed panel paintings in his exploration of the boundary between fine art picture-making and decorative craftsmanship. Three deer, pursued by a pair of white peacocks and watched by two mounted huntsmen, one carrying a spear, gambol across an idyllic landscape described in successive bands of dark green, deep yellow, and dull red that recede toward the high horizon. The ground is strewn with a variety of flowers and luxuriant fruit-bearing trees whose branches reach up to fill even the open spaces of the visible sky. The flat colors and simple profile forms of the deer, horses, and birds distributed across the shallow space with deliberate disregard for Western conventions of perspective lend this fanciful image a naïve charm.

Prendergast began creating his panel images following a 1911 visit to Venice, Italy, where he was intrigued by the traditional wood carvings he saw in churches and other settings. Already a renowned maker of innovative picture frames, he adapted familiar techniques to picture-making on flat wood surfaces: incising lines into an applied layer of gesso (a mixture of chalk and glue), coloring forms with tempera paint, adding gold leaf to highlight selected areas and weathering the surface for final effect. As in other examples (TF 1992.60, TF 1992.61), Prendergast finished the work by creating a simple frame using the same techniques.

This hunting scene, with its hilly topography and rich variety of animals, flowers, and trees, reflects Prendergast's fascination with Hindu and Islamic miniature painting, which often features mounted figures engaged in the hunt, sport, or battle in compressed, tipped-up landscape settings. Along with his older brother and sometime collaborator, painter and printmaker Maurice Prendergast, he shared with many early twentieth-century American and European artists an attraction to so-called primitive art from many sources, from non-Western cultures to native "folk" art, which offered not only alternate concepts of representation but a compelling authenticity. Prendergast's decorative panels were much in demand among collectors of modernist art, notably Lillie P. Bliss, benefactor of New York's Museum of Modern Art, who was the first owner of this work.

Special Summer Loan Exhibition of Paintings by Modern French and American Painters, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, June 12–October 14, 1926.

American Treasures: Chase, Whistler and the Prendergasts, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venues: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 26, 1996–January 5, 1997.

Clark, Carol, Nancy Mowll Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens. Maurice Brazil Prendergast; Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné. Munich, Germany and Williamstown, Massachusetts: Prestel-Verlag and The President and Trustees of Williams College, 1990. No. 2213, p. 666; ill. no. 2213, p. 666 (black & white).