Maurice Brazil Prendergast

Provenance:
The Artist.
The Collection of Charles Prendergast, the Artist's brother, 1924.
The Collection of Eugenie Pendergast, the Artist's wife, by 1948.
A gift from the above, 1986.
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia (accession number 86.192).

Lot Essay:
By the time the Beach Along the Harbor was painted, Prendergast was already a well-established artist, both in the United States and in Europe, where he not only followed a rigorous training in the 1890s, but also made pivotal acquaintances in the likes of English avant-garde artists Walter Sickert and Aubrey Beardsley, and French Post-Impressionists Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. Dubbed the “painter of modern life,” Prendergast liked to focus on the leisure activities and hobbies of the middle and upper classes, which he rendered in a colorful, mosaic-like fashion, as exemplified by the present work. The composition is divided into five distinct layers of rocky shoreline, sand, water, distant townscape, and sky, each captured in a distinct tonality ranging from brown, rust, turquoise, soft pink, and pale blue. Prendergast painstakingly reconciles different harmonies, joining them together in a complex network of loose brushstrokes, expressive swirls, and bold patches of color, which altogether contribute to a tapestry effect on the verge of abstraction.

While this harbor scene is pleasant and seemingly simple and earnest, Prendergast paid great attention to the composition. Here, he channels Cézanne's expressive use of form and adopts his love for color variations, once admitting: “Cézanne gets the most wonderful color, a dusty kind of grey.” Through color, which he loosely, yet thoughtfully applies on his canvas, Prendergast recreates a spontaneous moment that ravishes the spectator; an innocent, yet bold spectacle for the eyes. The work likely produced the same effect on the artist himself, as Beach Along the Harbor remained in the artist's collection during his entire lifetime, passing down to his widow who eventually donated the work to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1986.