Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1858-1924)

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Illustrated: Pages 96-97, watercolor and graphite on paper, 8-3/4 x 5-1/4 inches

Spanierman Gallery is delighted to offer for sale the last surviving and intact sketchbook by Maurice Prendergast that is not held by a museum.  An artist committed to recording contemporary life, Prendergast kept sketchbooks from the time he traveled to Paris in 1891 until his death in 1924.  The other eighty-eight extant examples are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (75); Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts (5); the Cleveland Museum (4); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2); the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington (1); and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (1).

In the artist’s estate after his death, the sketchbook (119 pages in length) was inherited by his brother Charles after Maurice’s death in 1924.  It was rescued from a fire that occurred in Charles's studio in the winter of 1924-25.  After Charles’s death, it was inherited by his widow, who retained it until 1984, when it passed into the collection of Robert Brady, a private collector from Mexico.  After his death in 1986, the sketchbook was in his estate, from which the gallery purchased it in the following year. Protected from the sun and light throughout the years, the pages have retained their original colors.  No fading has occurred. The link included provides a PDF of this charming fully bound volume in its entirety, presenting its twelve exquisite double-page watercolors (full works of art in their own right), four pages of crayon drawings, forty-two pages of pencil drawings, and one page of notes by the artist.  With the exception of one scene, rendered in the Boston Public Gardens, the vignettes of coastal landscapes and figures appear to have been executed during Prendergast's summer visits to Massachusetts's North Shore in the early 1920s, when he spent time in the resort towns of Annisquam, Gloucester, Nahant, Swampscott, and Marblehead. In the style typical of his mature aesthetic, Prendergast heightened the spontaneity and immediacy of each scene, using fluent handling to convey the idyllic feeling of American leisure life.  The result is an indelible record of the spirit of the era and of the artist at his peak.

View the full sketchbook
(PDF download times may vary)