Art: Bostonians at Andover

Last fortnight prepscholars scuffing the first fallen elm leaves around Andover, Mass, held an enviable artistic privilege— or so thought William Germain Dooley, art critic of the immortal Boston Evening Transcript. Just opened at Andover’s starchy, Georgian, richly-endowed Addison Gallery of American Art was the first comprehensive exhibition in New England of paintings by the late Maurice Prendergast and his brother, Charles, now 70. The Prendergasts were Boston boys whom Boston never bothered to honor. But since Impressionist Maurice has been dead for 14 years with an international reputation, home-town honors seemed at least timely to Mr. Dooley and once again, he had observed sadly, “the show that Boston should have had is being held elsewhere.” Initiator of the exhibition was urbane and eminent Critic Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England). An old friend of the Prendergasts, Mr. Brooks not only suggested the show to the Addison Gallery’s Curator Charles H. Sawyer but contributed to the catalogue an article, Anecdotes of Maurice Prendergast, that shone gemlike from its pages. Its simplicity was fitting because Maurice Prendergast was a simple man. While working in a Boston dry goods store as a boy, he made his first sketches of women’s dresses that stood about the shop. “Nothing amused his eyes,” says Van Wyck Brooks, “more than a pretty dress, blue, green, yellow or old rose, as one saw in all his pictures to the end of his life, the beach parties and fairytale picnics with their charming wind-blown figures and little girls with parasols and flying skirts.”

By 1886. when he was 27, Maurice Prendergast had saved up $1.000. He arrived in Paris in May, lived for three years on his $1,000. Back in Boston he never lost a chance to go to Revere Beach or Marblehead, when the weather was fine, to paint ships, bathers, surf. His paintings are all blobby, brightly-pied patterns, in a more distinctly personal technique than was developed by most U. S. followers of the French Impressionists, who broke up sunlight into a mist of colors. By 1901, when he painted In Central Park (see cut), he stood high among U. S. artists.

In 1914 an order for 18 of Brother Charles’s picture frames enabled the Prendergast brothers to move to a studio on Manhattan’s Washington Square. Charles gradually became known for decorative panels inlaid with silver and gold leaf, of which last week the Addison Gallery showed 19. Maurice, upright, high-collared, with silvery hair and mustaches, became so deaf that when friends called at the studio they swished newspapers under the door to catch his eye. Only his daily stroll around Washington Square interrupted his painting. “When short skirts came into fashion,” Van Wyck Brooks remembers, “he spoke of the beautiful movement that women had made when, at a streetcorner, they turned round to lift up their skirts before they scurried across the street. ‘That’s a lost art,’ he said.”