The Holiday Bookmark

Maurice Prendergast (American, 1859–1924)
The Holiday (detail), 1907–1909

Born in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Maurice Prendergast grew up in Boston. He studied painting in Paris, where he encountered all the avant-garde artistic theories of the day, but Impressionism exerted the strongest influence on the sensibility with which he returned to the United States.

Prendergast painted a number of idyllic seaside scenes in late middle age. Their opalescent colors, and Prendergast’s soft splash-and-layer finish, evoke soft breezes and a day’s freedom from care.