Franklin Park, Boston

Franklin Park, Boston exemplifies Maurice Prendergast's transformation of scenes of leisure at urban parks and beaches into decorative arrangements of vibrant spots of color. In this view, the high horizon, fringed by trees, screens the city from view and emphasizes the expansive breadth of parkland. The mingling crowd includes not only children and women carrying brightly colored parasols but also men, suggesting a work-free Sunday. All wear hats, a mark of gentility, as they stroll, converse, or sit in the shade of shrubbery.

Here, as in many of his early watercolor paintings, Prendergast freely sketched the scene in graphite before adding watercolor, through which the underlying drawing is clearly visible in such places as the figures of the white-gowned women. He applied paint in dense spots of bright color—notably in the round forms of heads, hats, and parasols—and in layers of thin washes that in places bleed one into another, as in the greens in the lower right foreground. The appearance of rapidity and freedom in Prendergast's watercolor technique lends works such as this a nervous vitality appropriate to what his contemporaries regarded as the frenetic pace of modern urban life. At the same time, his characteristic handling of the medium and his sense for composition and color independent of representation dematerialize the subject, anticipating the artist's later exploration of painting as the abstract decoration of a flat surface.

Prendergast created some six watercolor paintings, one oil painting (TF 1999.112), and one monotype (TF 1992.106) of scenes in Franklin Park, adjacent to Boston's Roxbury neighborhood where the artist, his brother Charles, and their father lived in 1895–96. This view is a horizontal image of a scene also shown in another watercolor view of the same title (TF 1999.111), whose vertical format admits a skyscape and a full view of the red house in the distance. This early exploration of a single subject across different media is an experimental approach to composition that Prendergast would repeat only a couple of years later while in Italy, when he created the closely related watercolor (TF 1999.117) and monotype (TF 1992.94) depicting Monte Pincio in Rome.

[possibly exhibited] Special Exhibition of Water Colors and Monotypes by Maurice B. Prendergast, Detroit Museum of Art, Detroit, Michigan, November 1901 (perhaps as no.15).

Maurice Prendergast 1861–1924: A Memorial Exhibition, Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 9–June ?, 1929, no. 21 (as Franklin Park, Gloucester).

The Prendergasts: Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of Maurice and Charles Prendergast, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, September 24–November 6, 1938. [exh. cat.]

Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, Boston Society of Water Color Painters, Boston, Massachusetts, April 18–May 14, 1939, no. 295.

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, 1960; 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.]

Paintings and Watercolors by Maurice Prendergast: A Loan Exhibition, Knoedler Galleries, New York, New York, November 1–26, 1966. [exh. cat.]

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

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.

Prendergast in Italy, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, July 18–September 20, 2009; The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, October 9, 2009–January 3, 2010; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, February 14–May 9, 2010. [exh. cat.]

In the Streets: Modern Life and Urban Experiences in the Art of the United States, 1893-1976 (Pelas ruas: vida moderna e experiências urbanas na arte dos Estados Unidos, 1893–1976). Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca de São Paulo (organizers). Venue: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil, August 27, 2022–January 30, 2023. [exh. cat.]

 

Pepper, Charles Hovey. "Is Drawing to Disappear in Artistic Individuality?" The World To-Day 19 (July 1910): 716–19. Text p. 719.

Rhys, Hedley Howell. Maurice Prendergast, 1859–1924. (exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts). Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harvard University Press, 1960. Text no. 56, p. 80 (checklist); ill. no. 56, p. 141 (black & white).

Paintings and Water Colors by Maurice Prendergast. (exh. cat., The Knoedler Galleries). New York: The Knoedler Galleries, 1966. Ill. no. 4 (black & white).

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. 614, p. 356; ill. no. 614, p. 356 (black & white).

Piccoli, Valéria, Fernanda Pitta, and Taylor Poulin. Pelas ruas: vida moderna e experiências urbanas na arte dos Estados Unidos, 1893-1976. (exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Terra Foundation for American Art). São Paulo, Brazil: Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2022. Pl. p. 37 (color).