Beechmont
Artist
Maurice Brazil Prendergast
(1858 - 1924)
Datec. 1900-05
MediumWatercolor with graphite on wove paper
Dimensions19 1/8 x 12 3/4 in. (48.6 x 32.4 cm)
ClassificationsWatercolor
Credit LineHarriet Russell Stanley Fund
Terms
Object number1944.16
DescriptionIn spring 1900 Prendergast enjoyed his first solo exhibition, at the Macbeth Gallery in New York, the American art capital, brought the artist a new level of recognition. He had been exhibiting steadily in Boston since 1895 and had enjoyed some acclaim there as well as in Philadelphia and Chicago in the late 1890s, the show at Macbeth brought new opportunities, including solo exhibitions at a gallery in San Francisco and at museums in Detroit and Cincinnati. Prendergast's appearance at Macbeth also brought him into contact with a circle of artists, dealers, and critics who were challenging what they considered staid academicism in American art. "Beechmont" belongs to a small group of watercolors that continued a theme, leisure at Boston's suburban seashore retreats, that had earned acclaim in the late 1890s. "Beechmont" demonstrates Prendergast's attempt to incorporate a naturalistic representation of figures and construction of space into his experiments with new styles and color combinations. He divided a vertically oriented sheet of watercolor paper into two horizontal bands and followed his established practice of sketching the composition in pencil; then, allowing the pencil lines to remain visible to specify such things as facial features, he added washes of color in strokes guided only partly by the pencil structure beneath, leaving some of the paper untouched to serve as whites and highlights. But unlike his beach scenes of 1896 and 1897 (a period in which some have placed "Beechmont"), large figures dominate the scene. Picking up their skirts and holding parasols aloft, a few women balance on large rounded rocks at the water's edge. Prendergast chose three distinct poses for the central trio of figures, framing the one who is seen straight on with one presented in profile (1) and another seen from the back. He purposefully stated his color harmonies by echoing the triad of red, yellow, and blue in the dress of the figure at right with a pinwheel of primaries formed by three skirts opposite her. Prendergast's combination of naturalistically presented, dynamically posed figures (more typical of his earlier work) and their new larger size, fewer number, and more assured construction join his abstract color statements to identify "Beechmont" as both experimental and transitional.
Further specifying "Beechmont" to be one of Prendergast's early-twentieth-century watercolors is the inclusion of flags, a motif he began to use during his Italian trip of 1898-99. Banners, strings of lanterns, and decorative nautical signal flags also embellished his Venetian spectacles, and he continued to use these with great success in his watercolors of New York. The implied festivity of flag-dressed boats and floral-hatted women in "Beechmont" is gently tempered by Prendergast's choice of time of day: late afternoon, as the sun is still bright enough to require parasols but is fading. This concern with suggesting the passage of time, especially the movement of day toward evening, is an important aspect of Prendergast's modernist experiments early in the century.
There is some doubt about the actual locale of this scene. Exhibitions of Prendergast's work at the turn of the century indicate his propensity for painting renowned sites, the Piazza San Marco, Central Park, and Madison Square, but he continued throughout his life to visit and paint Boston's coastal resorts. In Prendergast's time these local summer communities, Revere Beach the best known among them, brimmed with middle-class urbanites seeking recreation at the shore. Revere was transformed by the Metropolitan Park Commission in the mid-1890s into what then was regarded as a model seaside park, a strip of beach cleared of the commercial and residential development that rimmed it. Although the site of this drawing was identified by the artist's brother, Charles, as the north-shore resort just below Revere (its name, Beachmont, misspelled) (2), the terrain represented here, confirmed in contemporary descriptions, encourages a new identification of the locale. Edwin Bacon's popular Boston guidebook of 1903 described the spot simply as a "bold drumlin now covered by the semisummer-resort settlement of "Beachmont," but he had elaborated in an earlier volume:
At the Beachmont station we come upon a symmetrical drumlin rising forty or fifty feet, and affording fine water views. These views would be finer and fuller were the houses which thickly cover the bluff set with better skill and taste; but
neither skill nor taste, probably, entered into the scheme
of the development of this popular seaside dwelling-place.
(3)
There is very little accord between Bacon's description and Prendergast's foreground of rocky shore and strip of built-up land in the background, features also seen in the closely related watercolor, "Low Tide, Beachmont" (ca. 1900-1905; Worcester Art Museum, Mass.). The site is more likely along Boston's south shore near Hull, perhaps what was, and is still, appropriately called Stony Beach. (4)
Apart from title or site, it was not the geographical particulars of a resort that concerned Prendergast in this watercolor. By presenting women in fine attire disporting themselves both gracefully and clumsily while mixing with girls who unselfconsciously bend in front of us or link arms in friendship, and by punctuating the scene with one man who, like the paired girls, looks out at flag-bedecked sailboats, Prendergast filters Boston's social life through his own vision as a painter of public display as well as one increasingly concerned with pictorial experimentation and
invention.
CC
Bibliography:
Hedley Howell Rhys, "Maurice Prendergast, 1859-1924", exhib. cat. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1960); Eleanor Green, Ellen Glavin, and Jeffrey R. Hayes, "Maurice Prendergast: Art of Impulse and Color", exhib. cat. (College Park: University of Maryland, 1976); Cecily Langdale, "Monotypes by Maurice Prendergast in the Terra Museum of American Art" (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 1984); Carol Clark, Nancy Mowll Mathews, and Gwendolyn Owens, "Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné" (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1990); Nancy Mowll Mathews, "Maurice Prendergast" Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1990); Richard J. Wattenmaker, "Maurice Prendergast" (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
NOTES:
1. This figure is a reworking of similarly posed figures from about 1896-97; see especially "Low Tide" (ca. 1896-97; private collection), in Clark, Mathews, and Owens, "Catalogue Raisonné", no. 639.
2. The watercolor came to the museum from Charles Prendergast through Kraushaar, the Prendergast brothers' dealer. It is likely that Charles Prendergast entitled it "Beechmont" from memories of summer trips he and Maurice made to Boston's shore resorts. The museum has decided to retain the original title that misspells Beachmont, as Charles Prendergast did.
3. Edwin M. Bacon, "Boston: A Guide Book" (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1903), p. 142; Bacon, "Walks and Rides in the Country Round About Boston" (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1898), pp. 14-15.
4. For a discussion of this site, see Carol Clark, "The Robert Lehman Collection Vol. 8, American Drawings and Watercolors" (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 136-38. I remain grateful to Peter McCauley of Revere Beach for sharing with me his extensive knowledge of the history of Boston's shore resorts.
On View
Not on view
