This essay is excerpted from Eleanor Jones Harvey, An Impressionist Sensibility: The Hallf Collection, Exh. Cat. (2007), pages 114-118.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the promenade was a newly popular pastime, and Maurice Prendergast savored the experience of observing people of varying social classes who gathered in the public parks of New England and New York. In Park Scene Near Bay, Prendergast revels in the benign voyeurism of the flaneur, a man who walks the public parks and boulevards, observing people with a detached air. Several trip overseas to Paris and Venice had introduced Prendergast to the joys of this form of open-air entertainment, and he made the transition from the European parades and festivals to their more informal American counterparts with obvious ease.

Park Scene Near Bay is mature work, exploring Prendergast's ongoing fascination with seaside parks. Here, as in so many of the artist's oil paintings, he has laid down dense strokes of paint to create a mosaic of color and movement, while the composition is held together by a sinuous line borrowed from art nouveau (1). Women with their "Turkey red" parasols walk the paths or sit on benches or in the grass, and along with the men and children who complement them, form what Richard Wattenmaker aptly refers to as a modernized version of a fete galante (2). Prendergast's avant garde style captures the animated spirit of these festive outings without feeling the need to enumerate details. HIs approach to his subject deliberately blurs any specific sense of place in favor of a more general rendering of coastal topography and activity (3). In 1913 a critic noted, "Mr. Prendergast's folkscapes at the shore are already antiques . . . . They suggest both the texture and the feeling of old tapestries. These bright spotted crowds that wander before light blue seas may or may not be the outcome of studies at Coney Island or Revere Beach. The effect at any rate is romantic, idyllic, decorative" (4). That painterly syncopation is a hallmark of Prendergast's style, which developed as a rich amalgamation of experimentation and study at home and abroad.

In 1891 Prendergast had made his first trip to Paris, where he entered the most liberal art studio, the Academie Julian. He spent more time in museums and galleries, and roaming the city streets than in a classroom, and as one of his colleagues observed, he often took his sketchbook and pencils outdoors "in the cafes and the gardens, in the river, in the bois, constantly sketching. Cabs, nursemaids, sergents de ville, boats -- everything passes through his grist. Drawing moving life. Developing keen observation and memory of form and movement. He had found it of great value. It is, in fact, one of the bases of this art (5). He and James Morrice, a lifelong friend and fellow Canadian expatriate, spent many evenings in the cafes and theaters of Montmartre (6). His subsequent trip to Venice in 1898-99 reinforced his love of public spectacle, in particular the extravagant parades and promenades. "He soaked up Venice. Then saturated, he worked . . . . All day long, day after day. Evening burned pictures on his memory, to be painting in the morning." For a year, Prendergast toured Italy, imbuing his works with his appreciation for the old masters blended with a keen eye for modern street life (7).

Prendergast's first trips abroad set the tone for his mature work. His trip to Paris in 1907 had an equally important effect on his art, as it coincided with exhibitions of new work by Paul Cezanne, Edouard Vuillard, and Henri Matisse, and the neo-impressionist Paul Signac. In a letter to one of his patrons, Prendergast enthused, "All those exhibitions worked me up so much that I had to run up and down the boulevard to work off steam" (8). In fact they served as much to reaffirm what Prendergast already knew, that his art stood on the leading edge of modernism in America. Looking back, he perceptively commented to Walter Pach. "You are right about Cezanne; his work strengthened and fortified me to pursue my own course" (9). Closer to home, Prendergast exhibited work as part of The Eight in 1908 and developed friendships with some of the younger American modernsists, Marsden Hartley, Max Weber and Alfred Maurer. 

Prendergast's sketchbooks and notebooks are densely packed with references to specific works of art that caught his eye, and literary quotes pulled from an equally broad and varied group of writers and poets (10). Prendergast was omnivorous, assimilating influences derived from the art of the quattrocentro to Adolph Monticelli, from Japanese prints to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec posters, and from Antoine Watteau to Paul Cezanne. This fascinating cluster of resources makes understanding Prendergast's paintings less an exercise in identifying influences and more one of appreciating his ability to build an original style on a complex foundation. That vision caused many critics to sour on Prendergast's mature work, until the liberating force of the 1913 Armory Show made it clear that Prendergast was closer to the vanguard than many of his colleagues in The Eight. As such, it is worth noting that although Prendergast was a co-organizer of the exhibition, and sat on its selection committees for American and Foreign Art, it had minimal impact on his style. By the time of the Armory Show, Prendergast had absorbed the eye-opening work of the leading European modernists, and befriended the younger radical American painters. In such strong company, Prendergast flourished, and the Armory Show helped secure his position as part of the American avant-garde.

Even before the Armory Show, Prendegast enjoyed the patronage of some of America's leading collectors, and among those eager to buy his later work were Ferdinand Howald, Lillie Bliss, Duncan Phillips, and John Quinn (11). Afterward, Prendergast met Alfred Barnes, who also took an active interest in collecting work (12). The two men became friends, and the collector purchased numerous works directly from the artist until Prendergast's death in 1924. It is plausible that it was through Barnes that Park Scene Near Bay ended up in the collection of Nelle R. Mullen, who worked for Barnes and was an original trustee of the Barnes Foundation (13). It is not clear when Mullen acquired the painting, and since Prendergast had a tendency to rework parts of his compositions even after he had exhibited them, dating his works with any precision is difficult (14). What is clear is that on the even of World War I, in the aftermath of the Armory Show, Prendergast still took pleasure in the day-to-day interaction of ordinary people in public places. This painting, like his mature style, is a perfect blend of nostalgia and modernity. As another critic sagely noted, "Mr. Prendergast looks modern because he always kept off the beaten track; and he will still look modern when a good deal of the present product looks like the hoopskirts of 1860 . . . . His emphasis on color, motion, the relation of objects to each other -- not upon the many small details (15)."


For the endnotes to this essay, see page 118 of An Impressionist Sensibility.