Maurice Brazil Prendergast

The artist
Charles Prendergast, 1924 (his brother, by descent)
Private collection, 1945 (gift from the above)
Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2002

Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews and Gwendolyn Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990, no. 543, p. 336, illustrated

In the late 1890’s, Maurice Brazil Prendergast spent a significant amount of time studying in Paris with his brother Charles. It is there that he began to hone his skills at the Académie Julian, creating a large breadth of sketches and watercolors that captured Parisian life. The present work illustrates a woman walking down a Parisian boulevard in the evening and is a typical example of the artist’s single figure compositions. Similar works from Prendergast’s time in Paris include Ladies in the Rain, in the collection of the NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Lady on the Boulevard (The Green Cape), at the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, whose vertical composition and central placement of the subject closely resemble the present work. It was during this period of Prendergast’s career where he truly developed his own style, and the influences he adopted in Paris would extend into his latter body of work.