Maurice B. Prendergast 1858-1924

Painted circa 1915, Marblehead Rocks dates from the last decade of Prendergast’s career, when he continued to refine his highly individual artistic vision, and moved steadily toward abstraction.  Following his final visit to Paris in 1914, Prendergast limited his work to large-scale canvases, emphasizing the flatness of the pictorial plane with frieze-like arrangements of figures in idyllic holiday settings at the seashore or in the park.

Oils such as Marblehead Rocks, with its familiar procession of brightly clad figures strolling along the shore and dotting the surf, recall earlier compositions, reflecting the many years Prendergast spent observing the leisure class on holiday in New England and Europe.  The picturesque town of Marblehead was a favorite locale for the artist, as he wrote in a letter during September of 1915 to the American collector John Quinn, “. . .As a painter I like the surroundings of Boston the best.  Cohasset, Marblehead and Salem especially appeal to me. . ." (Richard J. Wattenmaker, Maurice Prendergast, New York, 1994, p. 127).

Richard J. Wattenmaker writes, “These fully realized majestic oils of Prendergast’s last decade are the culmination of more than thirty years of patient and determined exploration, trial and error, wholly personal variations on subjects that have captivated the most subtle and sophisticated minds of the Western tradition since the dawn of the Renaissance.  Prendergast’s comprehensive experiments within this humanistic tradition bring to bear his unique adaptations of ideas from both East and West.  If modern painting is primarily about extending the boundaries of color and color relations, Maurice Prendergast has a stature that guarantees him an important place in the pantheon with the masters he so admired and whose ideas he so richly repaid” (Maurice Prendergast, pp. 143, 145).