MAURICE BRAZIL PRENDERGAST 1858-1924
Sunset and Sea Fog, c. 1918-23
Oil on canvas, 18 X 29" (45.72 x 73.66 cm.)
Signed, lower right
Museum purchase, 955-0-128

Warm, glowing colors and evocative imagery make Sunset and Sea Fog one of the greatest of Maurice Prendergast's late oil paintings. Prendergast, born in St. John's, Newfoundland and raised in Boston, had participated in the major avant-garde movements of his day. He was inspired by the art he saw as a student in Paris in the 1890s and first made his mark with Impressionist watercolors of park and beach scenes. After 1900, he spent more time in New York capturing the life of the city alongside his new friends, who would become known as the Ashcan School. A trip to Paris, in 1907, opened his eyes to Paul C6zanne, Henri Matisse, and modernist ideas about color and abstract form which he introduced immediately into his work and spent the rest of his life exploring.
When Prendergast was in his late fifties and early sixties, he painted a number of large canvases like Sunset and Sea Fog on the theme of the seaside park, which he felt evoked an idyllic world where opposites were reconciled: nature and civilization, past and present, movement and rest. The scene, based on Prendergast's many sketches of actual seaside parks along the Massachusetts coastline, is transformed into a fairy tale by the setting sun and a mysterious red-haired equestrienne. At this point in Prendergast's career, he was searching for artistic statements that were more monumental and lasting than the small scale, naturalistic works of his early years. He was also at pains to create a style that was uniquely his own, one that would take advantage of the liberation of color and form that came with modernism but would not slavishly follow the succession of "isms" like
Futurism, Cubism, and Synchronism, to which he saw other modernist artists falling prey. In 1913, he had been an organizer of the Armory Show, the forward-looking exhibition of contemporary European and American art, but he said with a chuckle that there was "too much-0 my God!-art there."'
Prendergast's own style was based on a carefully adjusted combination of colors which were applied to the canvas in dots, patches, and layers. His compositions were typically laid out in horizontal zones that flattened forms and emphasized the richness of the surface texture. He stylized his figures, which were mostly female, into monumental goddesses, sometimes nude and sometimes clothed, who assume the stately poses of the antique but keep their humanity by playing with a dog or sporting a fashionable hat.
Sunset and Sea Fog was sold to the Washington collector Duncan Phillips in 1923. It is impossible to tell when it was painted, but it has the tell-tale signs of having stayed in Prendergast's studio for some time. Sunset and Sea Fog was probably begun by the late teens but, as was Prendergast's practice if a work was not immediately sold, he would "peck away" at it, "eager and exhilarated as he 'punched up' a canvas that might have seemed perfect before but in which he saw possibilities of greater depth, a hardier build, or more of light and richness." The result was a canvas of increasingly thick impasto and generalized form, or the "fog" of Sunset and Sea Fog.

NANCY MOWLL MATHEWS