The Breezy Common

The horizontal format that Maurice Prendergast used in The Breezy Common (CR 1657) is unusual in his monotypes.  Here it provides an expanse of green as a backdrop for the figures of running girls.  More typical of Prendergast's monotypes is the high horizon, which in this work conveys the immensity of the park.  Two fashionably dressed women and a girl attired in a peach-colored dotted dress form the focal point of the picture. They stride into the space from the left, in contrast to the little girls who gambol across the park from the right, all clad in white except for one in a red dress whose bright outfit balances the composition.  Along the bottom edge of the green line border that frames the image, Prendergast inscribed the work's title and his name.

Until 1896, the artist and his brother Charles Prendergast lived in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood adjacent to Franklin Park, the largest of the city's newly designed parks.  Renowned for its Commons, Franklin Park was part of the so-called Emerald Necklace, a continuous string of green spaces and America's first citywide park system, designed in the late nineteenth century by urban landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.  In the 1890s, leisure time for the working-class was a revolutionary new concept.  For urban industrial workers, Franklin Park was considered an ideal spot to spend one's weekends.

Prendergast produced scenes of Franklin Park in several media, including the oil painting Franklin Park, Boston (TF 1999.112), watercolors entitled Franklin Park, Boston (TF 1999.111 and TF 1999.113), and three monotypes entitled The Breezy Common (TF 1992.72, CR 1661; TF 1992.73, CR 1657; TF 1992.74, CR 1658). These works demonstrate Prendergast's fluid use of a single subject across different media.  Several share a compositional formula based on a watercolor sketch from the "Boston Water-color Sketchbook" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, CR 1478).  The "Franklin Park" suite is a subset of the series "Children at Play."

One of the monotypes bearing the same title (TF1992.74, CR 1658) is a cognate, or second impression, of The Breezy Common.  Other examples of cognates in the Terra Foundation collection include Children in Street (TF 1992.77, CR 1605) and Going to School (TF1992.85, CR 1606); and Primrose Hill (TF 1992.98, CR 1619) and Primrose Hill No. 2 (TF 1992.99, CR 1620). For more information, see Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné (1990), to which the CR numbers for the monotypes noted above refer.