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©
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Maurice Prendergast

The Shore

ca. 1913 - 1915
Watercolor, pastel and pencil on Paper.
44.4 x 55.9 cm
Carmen Thyssen Collection
Inv. no. (
CTB.1998.70
)
Not on display
  • Level 2 Permanent Collection
  • Level 1 Permanent Collection
  • Level 0 Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
  • Level -1 Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Level 2
Permanent Collection
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 13 15 16 17 18 22 19 20 21 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 Recommended start of the visitClassical rooms
1 14th Century. Early Italian Painting 2 15th Century. German and Spanish Painting 3 15th Century. Early Netherlandish Painting 4 15th Century. Italian Painting 5 15th and 16th Centuries. Renaissance Portraiture 6 16th Century. Villahermosa Gallery 7 16th Century. Italian Painting 8 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 9 15th and 16th Centuries. German Painting 10 16th Century. Netherlandish Painting 11 Tiziano, Tintoretto, Bassano and  El Greco 12 17th Century. Caravaggio and Baroque Painting 13 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 14 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 15 17th Century. Italian, French and Spanish Painting 16 18th Century. Italian Painting 17 18th Century. Italian Painting 18 18th Century. Italian Painting 19 Classical rooms 20 Classical rooms 21 Classical rooms 22 18th Century. Italian Painting 23 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 24 18th Century. French and English Painting 25 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Scenes of Daily Life and Interiors 26 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 27 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Portrait 28 17th Century. Dutch Painting. Landscape 29 19th Century. European Painting. Goya and Romanticism  
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
Level 0
Carmen Thyssen Collection and Temporary exhibition rooms
A B C D E F G H I J Hall Temporary exhibition rooms Access to Permanent Collection Entrance Access to Carmen Thyssen Collection Paseo del Prado Garden
A 17th and 18th Centuries. Old Masters B 19th Century. North American Landscape C 19th Century. French Naturalist Landscape D 19th Century. Impressionism E 19th Century. Monet and North American Impressionism F 19th Century. Gauguin and Postimpressionism G 19th and 20th Centuries. Neo Impressionism and its Wake H 20th Century. Early Avant-gardes I 20th Century. Between the Wars Painting. Cubism, Abstraction and Surrealism J 20th Century. North American Painting and Others • HALL
Level -1
Temporary exhibition rooms, Conference room and EducaThyssen workshop
Temporary exhibition rooms Conference room EducaThyssen Workshop
Prendergast's The Shore, painted around 1913-1915, with its broken colour closely relates to the neo-Impressionist works of Paul Signac of Saint-Tropez and Marseilles and Henri-Edmond Cross's landscapes of the Cote d'Azur that were done in 1906-1907. Prendergast arrived in Paris at the end of May 1907 too late to see either the exhibition of Signac's works at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in January-February or Cross's exhibition at the same gallery in April-May. He also missed the display of their works at the twenty-third exhibition of the Independents, but he was probably familiar with the Cross exhibition catalogue with a preface by Maurice Denis, as well as the fully-illustrated Signac catalogue with a preface by Paul Adam. "I am so chocked full of the exhibitions here, " Prendergast wrote before leaving Paris in autumn of 1907, "I don't know what influence it will have after I am once more home." 

Matisse's Luxe, calme et volupté painted in 1904-1905 while he was a companion of both Signac and Cross, shares the design and spirit, although in its riotous display of colour not the subdued tonality of Prendergast's The Shore. Each French painter, in turn, as well as Prendergast, was influenced by the elegiac compositions of Puvis de Chavannes. But the sense of festive pageantry found in the clothed figures parading across the foreground of The Shore and the subtle tones of Prendergast's watercolour suggest another source. The artist was greatly impressed by the paintings of Carpaccio which he saw in Venice during his 1898-1899 visit to Europe. Carpaccio's warm muted tones are captured perfectly in Prendergast's watercolour, while the distinctly vertical tree with its sparse foliage on the right of The Shore is a virtual quote from a Carpaccio canvas.

During the period that Prendergast painted The Shore, the artist was experimenting with broken colour, using mosaic-like blocks of pigment, and depicting subjects that were often Oriental. Prendergast had even, as Walter Pach related, obtained "a supply of the little cubes of stone or glass [and] tried some mosaics of his own". But The Shore is more linear in quality than Prendergast's mosaic-like paintings and more monochromatic in colour. While it relates slightly to Sailboats with Figures in Foreground, c. 1912-1915, Alabama, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the watercolour is unique in Prendergast's oeuvre.

In his late watercolours Prendergast would work first in watercolour and then enhance his work with pastel which allowed him to make colour changes unattainable in watercolour. But in The Shore, the darker tones of watercolour and lighter tones of pastels are juxtaposed across the surface of the neutral ground of the composition. Ira Glackens, son of William Glackens who was a member of The Eight, recorded the value that Prendergast attributed to the pigments used in his watercolour and pastels which the artist had brought back from Europe. His workbench, Ira wrote, "was covered with sticks of pastel and little glass jars of water colours. These colours were very precious and came, I believe, from Germany. In particular there was a jar of red-a beautiful dry vermilion that no other brand of water colours could equal. The pastels were mainly French and also prized, being far superior to domestic ones, [...] There were blues and purples no longer obtainable. These paints and pastels were the Prendergasts' most prized possessions."

Kenneth W. Maddox

20th Century19th Century - American painting. ImpressionismWork on paperWatercolor, pastel and pencilPaper
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The Shore. La orilla, c. 1913-1915
The Shore
Maurice Prendergast

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The Shore. La orilla, c. 1913-1915
The Shore
Maurice Prendergast

©

Carmen Thyssen Collection

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