The Boat Race

The Boat Race belongs to an important body of work executed after Maurice Prendergast's pivotal trip to Paris in 1907. Painted circa 1918-23, the present work exhibits Prendergast's predilection for capturing glimpses of picturesque crowds leisurely strolling along the tranquil New England shoreline expressed in a modern style uniquely his own. Milton Brown writes of Prendergast’s output from this period, “The gradual development of Prendergast’s late style, which was essentially ‘synthetic,’ may be a belated response to his earliest experiences in Paris in the early 1890s, when both Symbolism and Pointillism were current…it is difficult to conceive of Prendergast’s touche technique, which surfaces in many different guises from the early small dots and balloon spots to the later daubs and dashes, without some conscious reference to Seurat, Signac and Pointillism.” (“Maurice B. Prendergast,” Maurice Brazil Prendergast and Charles Prendergast, A Catalogue Raisonné, Williamston, Massachusetts, 1990, p. 22

As seen in The Boat Race, in the artist’s later years he continually explored realms of abstraction. Brown explains, “In these late paintings, Prendergast returns to an earlier three-band horizontality, but the bands are often firmly interlocked by a trellis of vertical forms. The brushstrokes become larger and bolder, and they take on an abstract quality apart from the underlying forms they are supposed to define, moving in independent directions, and varying in size and shape. But, while obscuring and overriding those forms, they succeed in unifying the pictorial surface.” (Maurice Brazil Prendergast and Charles Prendergast, A Catalogue Raisonné, p. 22) Indeed, painted with a mirthful diaspora of colors and impressive in scale, The Boat Race embodies the artist’s best output from this period.