Maurice Prendergast May Day in the Park

17. Maurice Prendergast
May Day in the Park (Road to the Beach, Nahant), c. 1915-1916
Watercolor, pastel, and pencil on paper
12 x 17 7/8 inches

Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924)
May Day in the Park (Road to the Beach, Nahant) c. 1915-16
Watercolor, pastel and pencil on paper
12 x 17 7/8 inches

Signed lower left center: Prendergast

Ex collections:

The artist
Charles Prendergast, 1924
Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1948
Coe Kerr Gallery, 1987
Private collection, until the present

Exhibitions:

New York, Coe Kerr Gallery, "The Unknown Pastels: Maurice Brazil Prendergast," November 4-December 5, 1987, plate II (as Road to the Beach, Nahant), illustrated in color

Literature:

Adelson, Warren. "The Unknown Pastels: Maurice Brazil Prendergast," November 4-December 5, 1987, pl. II (as Road to the Beach, Nahant), illustrated in color.
Clark, Carol, Nancy Mowll Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens. "Maurice Brazil Prendergast/Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné." Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, and Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1990, p. 509; ill. p. 508, no. 1224.

Children at play around the maypole was a theme explored by Prendergast at the turn of the century in New York. He painted several crowd scenes of well-dressed strollers and ladies with parasols among young girls in white dresses holding ribbons while performing the joyous spring dance, (see May Day, Central Park, 1901, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). More than a decade later, the artist returned to the same theme, not in a dense urban park, but a seaside resort on the north shore of Massachusetts. Here the maypole is less a focal point, and the size of the crowd has been diminished from the earlier work, the throng of people having become, rather, an abstraction of a crowd. The medium has changed as well. Instead of a tightly rendered watercolor, the artist uses that medium as an undercoat over which strokes of pastel are applied. The pastel colors have a purity and density not present in the earlier watercolor. Moreover, there is a boldness of brushwork, a bravura stroke to the medium, much like the surface of Prendergast's oil paintings of this period.