Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1859-1924)
St. Malo, ca. 1907
Watercolor, pencil and gouache on paper
Williams College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 86.18.74
When Maurice settled in for a long stay in the fashionable resort town of St. Malo, he tried various techniques to make his beach scenes more daring. In many of the sketches he made on small 11x14 inch panels, such as St. Malo, one finds the vivid colors that were the direct result of the art he saw in Paris. The pure blues, reds, and greens are more brilliant than any he had used in the past. The boldness of the color is intensified by the crude visible brushstrokes that are used from foreground to background, minimizing the illusion of three-dimensional space and unifying the paint surface into a sea of choppy colors. An air of festivity pervades throughout this series of brilliantly colorful scenes of vacation life.
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