Lot 43

Artist, designer, world traveller, art collector, and all-around genuine bon vivant, Robert Brady was born in 1928 into an affluent family in the Midwestern town of Fort Dodge, Iowa. His mother, an art teacher, instilled in her son a love for the arts from an early age--a passion Brady would develop further through his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, Temple University in Philadelphia and the legendary Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. His fearless and eclectic approach to collecting would be further stimulated by his global travels, most notably a prolonged European sojourn in the 1950s during which he befriended indefatigable doyenne of modern art Peggy Guggenheim and became a member of her elite circle of friends, including many artists and writers from the Beat generation. In 1959 Brady moved to Mexico where he purchased a massive sixteenth-century Franciscan monastery in Cuernavaca--Casa de la Torre--which he lovingly restored and transformed into his home and showplace for his growing collection of fine, decorative and popular arts--spanning Africa, the Americas, Oceania, India and East Asia. Numbering over thirteen hundred objects at the time of his death in 1986, the collection includes important works by Frida Kahlo, Mara Izquierdo, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Maurice Prendergast, Marsden Hartley, and Graham Sutherland, among others. Upon his death, the home was converted into the Museo Robert Brady--and today provides visitors with a fascinating glimpse into a remarkable and highly idiosyncratic vision and style of living with art. PROPERTY FROM THE ROBERT BRADY MUSEUM FOUNDATION

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1859-1924)

By the Sea

Details

Maurice Brazil Prendergast (1859-1924)
By the Sea
signed 'Prendergast' (lower left)
oil on canvas
18¼ x 13¼ in. (46.4 x 33.7 cm.)
Painted circa 1918-23.

Provenance

The artist.
Charles Prendergast, brother of the above, 1924.
Mrs. Charles Prendergast, wife of the above, 1948.
Robert Brady, acquired from the above.
By bequest to the present owner, 1986.

Literature

C. Clark, N.M. Mathews, G. Owens, Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1990, p. 324, no. 489, illustrated.

Lot Essay

The present work is the left portion of a once larger painting which was divided in half, possibly by Maurice Prendergast as the separation was completed during his lifetime. The right half, Edge of the Woods, is in the collection of the Blanden Memorial Art Museum in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

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