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signed Prendergast, l.r.

oil on canvas

Painted circa 1918-23.
PROVENANCE

Private Collection
Bing family, New York
By descent in the family
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990, no. 466a, p. 810, illustrated
CATALOGUE NOTE

While many of Maurice Prendergast's paintings from 1918-1923 are set in imaginary locales, Afternoon Stroll, Summer, most likely relates to a series of oils and pastels executed during his last decade, which feature distinctive New England architecture suggesting real, if unidentifiable, locations. Painted during this time, Afternoon Stroll, Summer depicts a busy village sidewalk set against a backdrop of clapboard houses, white fences, and green manicured lawns. Prendergast renders the stream of pedestrians on the sidewalk with bold, jewel-like color, and his lively, varied brushstrokes suggest the strollers in motion as they merge with the landscape around them. Compositionally, the central tree, which extends vertically from the sidewalk to the uppermost region of the sky, offsets Prendergast's distinctive horizontal structure, and defines the spatial relationships between the various planes of the picture.

Afternoon Stroll, Summer fully incorporates Prendergast's increasingly modern ideas about color and form, yet also returns to a theme he explored throughout his career?fashionable members of the leisure class enjoying themselves in an idyllic landscape. Like the Post-Impressionists, Prendergast emphasized the flatness of the picture plane, dividing the composition into horizontal bands of color and creating a mosaic-like design. He "applied a carefully worked out color scheme in small dabs of paint. The result is an overall open surface pattern that allows the light...underneath to shine through for a glowing luminous effect" (Nancy Mowll Mathews, Maurice Prendergast, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Williams College Museum of Art, 1990, p. 27).

This painting retains a Max Kuehne frame.