Charles Prendergast

Charles Prendergast merged craftsmanship and art in his hand-carved picture frames, polychromed carved panels, and decorated wooden functional objects. As a small child Prendergast moved with his family from his native Newfoundland to Boston following the failure of his father's business. He shared a taste for drawing with his older brother Maurice Prendergast, who also became an artist. Charles left school at the age of fourteen to work as an errand boy in a Boston gallery, an experience interrupted by two brief trips to Europe on a cattle boat. While Maurice, five years his senior, began studying to be a painter, Charles focused on the business side of the arts. By the mid-1890s, he was a partner in a firm that manufactured decorative wooden moldings. As Maurice took his place in Boston's art scene following his training in Paris, Charles began to specialize in hand-carved picture frames, soon attracting commissions from some of America's most important collectors of modernist and Old Master art.

The Prendergast brothers developed a close personal and professional relationship that ended only with the elder's death in 1924. Trained in carving and decorating techniques by Charles, Maurice occasionally assisted his brother with major frame commissions. In turn, Charles was brought into contact with advanced ideas in contemporary art through Maurice's involvement with such circles as that of Robert Henri. In accordance with the so-called Arts and Crafts movement, Charles undertook every aspect of frame-making himself and looked to such non-conventional sources as Islamic miniature painting, of which he studied examples at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, as inspiration for his designs.

In 1911, when he was at the height of his reputation as America's most innovative art-frame maker, Charles made an important trip to Italy, where he developed a new interest in Italian traditions of Christian imagery. He began to carve decorative panels and objects, using many of the techniques of frame-making to make pictures using incised gesso (a mixture of chalk and glue coating the picture surface), tempera paint for color, and gold leaf. Charles exhibited his panels side-by-side with Maurice's paintings, with which they share aspects of subject and style, in several joint exhibitions following the brothers' 1914 move from Boston to New York, where they shared a studio-residence on Washington Square. Maurice's death ten years later was a devastating blow for Charles, but on a consolatory trip to France, he met Eugénie Van Kemmel, whom he married in New York in 1925; the couple later made their home near Westport, Connecticut. Charles's neo-primitive personal style met a receptive audience at a time when collectors were discovering America's so-called folk arts. In the 1930s his subjects began to include the American scene: parks, zoos, and small-town life, and he later pictured scenes inspired by his travels in Florida and by Haitian art. Although never as celebrated as his brother, Charles achieved distinction in his unusual chosen media. In recent decades, however, the increasing fragility of many of his gessoed panels and objects has limited exposure of his work through exhibition.