The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 37, no. 4

MAURICE PRENDERGAST Piazza di San Marco, about 1898
Prendergast brought the decorative principles
of Post-Impressionism to watercolor
ten years before Sargent's Impressionist
style bloomed in that medium. Prendergast
was an accomplished watercolorist in
the mid-90s, but his technique reached
maturity during a two-year trip to Italy in
1898-99, when he began to work inten-
Prendergast characteristically added a
Post-Impressionist play between the surface
pattern and the illusion of deep space
to the Impressionist street scene with its
bird's-eye perspective and abstracted detail.
His taste for decorative flatness grew
quickly, for Courtyard, West End Library,
Boston, 1901 (on the cover), with its
Cezanne's compositional geometry, reinforced
by a surface network of pen contours
and scrapings. Prendergast was at his
best in watercolor, and his example, combined
with the tremendous prestige of
Homer's and Sargent's work, guided the
younger modernists who made watercolor
a distinctly American medium in the early