Maurice Brazil PRENDERGAST (1858-1924) : GLOUCESTER, 1918. W - Lot 186

Maurice Brazil PRENDERGAST (1858-1924) : GLOUCESTER, 1918. Watercolor and gouache, signed lower left and dated 1918. 28 x 39.5 cm. Bibliography: Prendergast Charles. Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: a catalog raisonné. Williamstown (Massachusetts): Williams College Museum of Art, 1990. Our watercolor is referenced there under number 1289. Provenance: former collection of Peter A. Wick, curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum and Houghton Library, loaned and then given to the current owner's mother. Maurice Brazil PRENDERGAST (1858-1924) American post-impressionist artist. Initially self-taught, painting souvenir cards and signs, then trained at the Académie Julian, it was in the French capital that Prendergast made the acquaintance of Canadian painter James Wilson MORRICE, who brought him into the circle of British avant-gardists. Prendergast is best known for having been a member of the group dubbed "The Eight" by the American press, who exhibited at the Macbeth Galleries (Manhattan) in 1908, and whose members displayed their contempt for the mediocrity of official American art circles. A singular, almost marginal figure in his time, Prendergast's work is distinguished by the density of his compositions, the innumerable, tightly-packed crowds that animate them, the accumulation of detail and chromatic polyphony.