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Maurice Brazil Prendergast
American, 1858-1924
Sunday in the Park, circa 1910-13
Signed Prendergast (lr)
Oil on panel
11 5/8 x 16 1/4 inches

Provenance:
The artist
Charles Prendergast, the artist's brother, 1924
Eugenie Prendergast, the wife of Charles Prendergast, 1948
Private collection, 1950
Private collection, Washington, D.C.

Literature
Clark, Carol, Nancy Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast/Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonne, Williamstown, Mass., Williams College Museum of Art, 1990, p. 266, no. 273, illus.

Maurice Prendergast apprenticed with a commercial artist in Boston before traveling to Paris to study at the famed Academie Julien. There he met a number of contemporary French and English artists, who profoundly influenced him. When he returned to the United States, he became a member of the Eight, a group of artists who worked in very diverse styles, many of whom specialized in painting scenes from lives of the urban working class. Prendergast, by contrast, delighted in painting parks, beaches, and streets thronged with fashionably dressed people in a gay mood. His highly personal technique deployed flat areas of bright color in rhythmic patterns, in compositions that frequently resemble mosaics.

William H. Gerdts writes of the evolution in the artist's work following a visit to Paris in 1907, when he was struck by the palette of Cezanne. In response, Prendergast increasingly began to paint in oil, applying the medium more heavily, and emphasizing two-dimensional patterns of simplified shapes. "Figures in seaside parks were integrated with surrounding foliage, all laid out on a single plane..." [William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984, 287]

A work of the artist's maturity, Sunday in the Park is a classic example of this approach, and may depict a park scene in one of the suburbs surrounding Boston, where Prendergast made his home. He exhibited seven works of this type in the Armory Show in 1913; he moved to New York the following year.