Four Figures and Donkey with Basket of Flowers

One of some 125 decorative wooden panels created by Charles Prendergast, Four Figures and Donkey with Basket of Flowers evinces the artist's interest in the imagery and compositional formats of ancient Near Eastern relief carving, Persian and Indian miniature painting, so-called folk art, and other sources to which many early twentieth-century American and European artists looked in their search for expressive "authenticity." Dominated by dull tints of red, gold, green, and white, this work features a flattened frieze-like arrangement of four symmetrically arranged profile female figures, a centrally placed donkey bearing a basket filled with brightly colored fruits or baubles, and a tree whose graceful leafy fronds twine themselves around the two central figures, who reach forth to hold the basket. The woman on the far left proffers a bunch of flowers in a vessel in one hand as she reaches down with the other to grasp a willowy flowering plant; her counterpart on the right holds forth an intricately patterned cloth. All four figures are clothed in close-fitting, elaborate red and gold garments that evoke "oriental" costume. They stand on a narrow band of green that indicates the ground; on the right a low mass of striated green and gold, fringed with suggestions of grass and flowers, hints at a background landscape in perspective.

Following a summer's stay in Venice, Italy in 1911, Prendergast began to make carved and incised decorative panels in addition to the elaborate custom picture frames for which he was renowned. In his first panels he used sculpted relief to endow forms with three-dimensionality in relation to the backgrounds. He soon shifted, however, to more delicate techniques that emphasized the flat planarity of the wood panel surface.  Prendergast applied a layer of gesso (a mixture of chalk and glue) on which he incised the outlines of his figures and other forms; he then colored the image with tempera paint and gold leaf, burnishing these decorated surfaces to achieve a weathered effect.

Like his older brother, painter and printmaker Maurice Prendergast, Charles sought inspiration from "exotic" art in which Western conventions of spatial depth are alien, and both artists favored compositions in which figures are spread across a shallow, stage-like space, as demonstrated here and in Maurice's Opal Sea (TF 1999.118). For Charles, this manner of treating space grew naturally from his practice of decorating the surfaces of his picture frames, and he also extended it into the decoration of such functional objects as chests (TF 1992.59). Charles adapted imagery and styles from a wide variety of sources, and his use of Near Eastern motifs was reinforced by the Near Eastern-inspired figural art of Frenchman Henri Matisse (1869–1954). This work and the panel entitled Two Hunters on Horseback and Deer in Landscape (TF 1992.62) are the products of what Prendergast called his "celestial" or "oriental" period, between 1912 and 1928, during which he evoked the exoticism and other-worldly fantasy that western imaginations imposed on Near Eastern and South Asian cultures.

A Proud Heritage: Two Centuries of American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 21–June 21, 1987. [exh. cat.]

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

Extended Loan on View, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, January 27, 2011–2012.

Crawford, M. D. C. "The Carved Gesso Panels of Charles E. Prendergast." Country Life in America 36 (September 1919): 47-49.

Hudson, Pedro Hernandez. "Los Paneles de Yeso Tallado de Carlos E. Prendergast." La Revista del Mundo 6 (November 1919): 86–89. Ill. p. 86.

Atkinson, D. Scott et al. A Proud Heritage: Two Centuries of American Art. Edited by Terry A. Neff. (exh. cat., Terra Museum of American Art). Chicago, Illinois: Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1987. Pl. T-143, p. 252 (color).

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. 2246, p. 677; ill. no. 2246, p. 677 (black & white).

Mathews, Nancy Mowll. The Art of Charles Prendergast From the Collections of the Williams College Museum of Art & Mrs. Charles Prendergast. (exh. cat., Williams College Museum of Art). Williamstown, Massachusetts: Williams College Museum of Art, 1993. Text p. 16; fig. 5, p. 16 (black & white).