Marblehead in Art: Maurice Prendergast

Maurice Brazil Prendergast, an American Post-Impressionist artist worked in oil, watercolor, and monotype. 

Maurice Brazil Prendergast  and his twin sister, Lucy, were born at their family's subarctic trading post in Newfoundland, a British Colony in North America. After the trading post failed, the family moved to the South End in Boston.

He left school after only eight or nine years and was apprenticed to

work for a commercial art firm. This conditioned him from the start to the brightly colored, flat patterning effects that characterized his mature work. He was a shy individual who remained a bachelor throughout his life and experienced increasing deafness in his later

years. He was  accompanied and supported by his brother Charles, who was also an artist.

Maurice always wanted to be an artist and spent every available moment sketching. He went to Paris for three years starting in 1892 Studying under Gustave Courtois at the Atelier Colorossi, then under the Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice at the Académie Julian which is where he began executing Pochades; small sketches on wood panels depicting elegantly dressed women and playful children at the seaside resorts of

Dieppe and Saint-Malo.  

In 1895, home from abroad, Prendergast continued to focus on men, women, and children at leisure, strolling in parks, on the beach, or traveling the city streets. In 1898 he went to Venice and returned a year later

with a series of watercolors of the city. In 1900 the Macbeth Galleries in New York mounted an exhibition of his work. 

In 1907 he returned to France, where he was profoundly influenced by Cézanne and the fauves. Integrating these new influences into his work, Prendergast painted more forceful works of art, with startling bright colors and staccato brushstrokes. 

During the final years of his career, Prendergast spent his summers sketching in New England and his winters painting in New York. By 1923, he was in frail health, and he died a year later at the age of sixty-five.