Sunset, Boston (Primary Title)
Maurice Brazil Prendergast, American, born Canada, 1858 – 1924 (Artist)
This pastel captures the urban skyline at the threshold between day and night. The radiant orange disk of the sun casts its glow onto the city streets and trails its reflected image in the harbor below. In the foreground, an elegant women in fashionable costume saunters down a meandering path. Two additional figures, silhouettes in blue, appear in the middle distance, separated from the cityscape by the light horizontal strokes that invigorate the rippling water. Sunset, Boston was painted shortly after Prendergast’s return from a four-year residence in Paris. His unique style and modern subject matter linked him with other urban realists who shared his disaffection for academic strictures. Together they formed a group called The Eight.
at lower right: Prendergast
James W. and Frances Gibson McGlothlin Collection
Newton Club, Boston, Massachusetts (December 1896): no. 337.
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