Franklin Park, Boston

Three women and numerous girls, all properly attired in hats for a day in the park, amuse themselves across open parkland in Maurice Prendergast's idyllic Franklin Park, Boston. Dotted with trees whose slender trunks and leaves cast a pattern across the sky, the landscape stretches toward a high horizon marked by a narrow band of bright blue, repeated in the blue shadows at the figures' feet that indicate a late afternoon setting. The red of a parasol held aloft by one of the women is echoed in her hat and in several balloons floating above the girls. Figures and landscape are broadly painted, simplified in an evocation of a child's naïve art. Such decorative so-called primitivism was a mark of modernism among Prendergast's artistic contemporaries.

Franklin Park was the last and the largest of the parks designed by master landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted for the so-called Emerald Necklace, a chain of parks, parkways, and waterways in Boston and nearby Brookline, Massachusetts. The park borders Boston's Roxbury neighborhood, where the artist, along with his brother Charles and their father, lived in 1895–96. The blue line along the horizon in this painting may refer humorously to Blue Hill Avenue, which runs along the park's eastern edge. Prendergast made several images showing Franklin Park, including one monotype, Spring in Franklin Park (TF 1992.106) and at least six watercolors, of which the Terra Foundation owns two (TF 1999.111 and TF 1999.113). This group of works demonstrate the artist's experimental method of exploring a subject across various media, an approach he also used in making an oil painting (TF 1999.119a) and two monotypes (TF 1992.110 and TF 1992.111) of Telegraph Hill.

By 1895, Prendergast was gaining recognition on the Boston art scene as an innovative painter of lively scenes of contemporary urban leisure rendered in decorative arrangements of spots of pure color. Before 1909, the artist worked mostly in watercolor painting and monotype printmaking, and his relatively rare oils, broadly painted in thinly applied pigment, typically share the intimate scale of his watercolor paintings. While the monotype Spring in Franklin Park demonstrates the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, which were critical to the development of Prendergast's aesthetic sensibility, in this oil painting of Franklin Park, the deliberate flatness of figures and setting and the spotted patterns of leaves, balloons, and heads evoke the works of French avant-garde painter Georges Seurat (1859–91). Prendergast likely saw an exhibition of Seurat’s work in Paris in 1892. At that time he may also have seen exhibitions of the works of the younger French painters known collectively as Les Nabis ("the prophets"), whose paintings, dense "tapestries" of spots emphasizing the flatness of the painting's surface, may have been another influence on Prendergast as he created Franklin Park, Boston.

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Eleventh Annual Exhibition of Oil Painting and Sculpture by American Artists, The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, November 15–December 18, 1898, no. 230.

Sixty-eighth Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 16–February 25, 1899, no. 226.

Twenty-first Annual Exhibition of the Society of American Artists, Society of American Artists, New York, New York, March 25–April 29, 1899, no. 171.

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The Eight, Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, New York, November 24, 1943–January 16, 1944 (traveled), no. 44. [exh. cat.]

Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition: Paintings by American Artists 1896–1930, Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, Syracuse, New York, January 23–March 2, 1947, no. 27.

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Maurice Prendergast, 1859–1924, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (organizer). Venues: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, October 26–December 4, 1960; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, December 29, 1960–February 5, 1961; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, February 21–April 2, 1961; California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California, April 22–June 3, 1961; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, June 20–July 30, 1961. [exh. cat.]

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Regard sur Maurice Brazil Prendergast (Maurice Brazil Prendergast at a Glance), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 1993.

Domestic Bliss: Family Life in American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 12–June 22, 1997.

Selections from the Permanent Collection: Art and Craft, The Work of Charles and Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, March 10–September 16, 2001.

A Place on the Avenue: Terra Museum of American Art Celebrates 15 Years in Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, November 16, 2002–February 16, 2003 (on exhibit extended run: November 2, 2002–March 2, 2003).

Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, July 15–October 31, 2007.

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