Promenade with Parasols

On an expanse of lawn overlooking the open sea, trios of women and girls promenade, sit, or gaze out over the water in Maurice Prendergast's Promenade with Parasols. Broadly painted in horizontal strokes or rounded spots of oil paint, the image has a dreamlike unreality. Several vessels, apparently old-fashioned fully-rigged sailing ships, float on the sea, and above a solitary tree on the right the arc of a fantastic rainbow of pink, yellow, and green cuts across the sky. Dark tones near the top edge suggest storm clouds rolling back from the scene.

Before around 1909, Prendergast concentrated on watercolor painting and monotype printmaking and made relatively few paintings in oils. The latter share the small scale of his watercolor paintings and are often made on wood panels rather than the more conventional stretched canvas. Promenade with Parasols was painted on a panel on the other side of which Prendergast painted Telegraph Hill (TF 1999.119a). In the mid-1980s, the panel was divided into two separate artworks.

Both paintings are freely brushed images of women and girls on a shoreline, before a background expanse of water dotted with sailing ships. Like Prendergast's many views of local parks, such as the oil-on-panel painting Franklin Park (TF 1999.112), also from the mid-1890s, these show the artist's attraction to flattened, frieze-like compositions across which figures and other forms are distributed in accordance with purely formal compositional values.

Telegraph Hill, in the elevated South Boston area called Dorchester Heights, commands an expansive view of Dorchester Bay and the larger Boston Harbor. During the Revolutionary War, Dorchester Heights was the site of important American military fortifications that ultimately secured Boston from British control; American troops occupied it again during the War of 1812. In the mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Park was laid out in an oval at the summit of Telegraph Hill and in the following three decades the surrounding area was developed as a residential quarter. Undoubtedly Prendergast would have found Thomas Park peopled by visitors taking in the panoramic view of the bay dotted with ships. In his painting, all these forms serve his exploration of the decorative possibilities of pigment applied to a flat surface.