13. Charles Prendergast Clothesline, Florida, 1946 Watercolor on paper 8 1/2 x 7 3/8 inches

Charles Prendergast (1863-1948)
Clothesline, Florida, 1946
Watercolor on paper
8 1/2 x 7 3/4 inches

Inscribed verso in pencil: from Mrs. Charles Prendergast, Florida, 1946

Ex-collections:

The artist
Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1948
Private collection, 1969, as a gift from Mrs. Prendergast,
until the present

Exhibitions:

New York, Davis Galleries, "Charles Prendergast," October 22- November 9, 1963, no. 27
Storrs, University of Connecticut The William Benton Museum of Art, "Connecticut's Quiet Corner Collects," March 20-May 21, 1989

In 1946 and 1947, Charles Prendergast produced a series of watercolors while staying in Winter Park, Florida. These works are small in scale and generally of the black population at work or leisure. Our watercolor records a woman hanging laundry; a child helps while a dog with a red collar runs by. Fantastic palm trees stretch to the tropical sun, repeating the woman's movements of her task. The surface of the paper is alive with light and color.

Perry Rathbone writes: "...his watercolors, like the panels and screens, depend upon his unerring sense of two-dimensional pattern, they are alive with decorative color and they are dictated by a similar naiveté. Many of them reflect Charles Prendergast's travels in Europe. In all of them, as in his entire œuvre, Charles expressed that which one inevitably associates with the Prendergasts, the exciting beauty of the visual world and the joy of living."*

*Perry T. Rathbone, Charles Prendergast, exh. cat. (New York: Davis Galleries, 1963), introduction.

© 1997 Adelson Galleries, Inc