The Race

In Maurice Prendergast's monotype The Race (CR 1669), a riot of swirling brushwork evokes the movement of running children.  The artist rendered them in dashing strokes of blue, ocher, red, black, and white across the bright green background.  What appear as widely spaced steps may be planks bridging a narrow stream or canal.  Between the supports, on which several girls in white dresses are posed, are strokes of blue that apparently indicate water.  Scattered circles of red may be balls or balloons.  In the right distance, the lawn terminates at a line of tall ocher-tinted buildings on the edge of the park.

  The monotype's remarkably free style, in which figures and objects are merely suggested by active brushstrokes and the rapid wiping away of pigment, represents one aspect of Prendergast's experimental approach to the monotype. The Race is replete with signs of the artist's varied process, from swirling touches of paint applied or removed to indicate such forms as windblown dresses and fluttering birds, to broad individual vertical and horizontal stokes to define the central structure that anchors the composition.  The apparently spontaneous technique of this monotype, in which the image seems to be the organic product of the artist's manipulation of his pigment, contrasts sharply with the more deliberate approach exemplified in Crescent Beach (TF 1992.79, CR 1644).  This monotype is easily identified as part of the "Children at Play" series.

Until 1896, Prendergast lived in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury near Franklin Park, the largest of the urban green spaces designed by Frederick Law Olmsted as part of Boston's park system, known as the "Emerald Necklace". The activities of visitors to Franklin Park provided a variety of subjects for the artist.  The fluid brushwork and subject of The Race places it in another of the artist's monotype series, "Springtime Play."  In addition to The Race, the monotypes inspired by the setting include, among others, Spring in Franklin Park (TF 1992.106, CR 1646), in In the Park (TF1992.86, CR 1642), three entitled The Breezy Common (TF 1992.72, CR 1661; TF 1992.73, CR 1657; and TF 1992.74, CR 1658), and Reflection (TF 1992.104, CR 1667)—the last featuring a narrow stream bridged by planks similar to that in The Race.

 Several of these monotypes are dated 1895 on the matrix, making that a likely date for The Race as well. For more information, see Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné (1990), to which the CR numbers for the monotypes noted above refer.