The Bridle Path, Central Park

Refreshed from his travels in Italy, Maurice Prendergast returned to the United States in 1899 and continued to explore the watercolor medium in which he had already achieved extraordinary success. Describing Prendergast's watercolors executed soon after his return to America, Richard J. Wattenmaker writes, "He had learned in Italy what the Post-Impressionists had learned in the Louvre—that Impressionism, in all its gloriously colorful aspects, was an insufficiently broad foundation for an artist. He knew, as he studied the achievements of the Italian masters, that the ease and control over the medium of watercolor that he had so mastered was merely a point of departure for the new and more difficult tasks that he would set for himself. With the determination that was integral to his personality, he began to approach painting in the same spirit." (Maurice Prendergast, New York, 1994, p. 59) Painted in 1902, the present work of Central Park’s Bridle Path exemplifies the fruits of this new approach.

The Bridle Path, Central Park exhibits characteristics that link the work with Prendergast's Italian efforts, but at the same time reveals how the artist was consciously refashioning his art and taking it in new directions. Similar to many of his Venetian paintings, The Bridle Path, Central Park illustrates Prendergast's fascination with crowds found in popular public places of the new middle class. Nancy Mowll Mathews writes, "His talent and personality drew him to the kind of experiences turn-of-the-century leisure offered: the colorful jostling of holiday crowds, the experience of nature mediated by parasol and windswept banner, and the lowering of class and gender barriers to foster a sense of inclusiveness—however fleeting...True to his age, leisure became the great theme of Prendergast's art. Over time, attitudes and values changed, but he never lost his reverence for a subject that he felt made people more civilized and more human. Nor did he forget that art itself was a leisure-time spectacle." (The Art of Leisure: Maurice Prendergast in the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 15-16)

In addition to its exploration of everyday activities of the modern leisure class, The Bridle Path, Central Park simultaneously exhibits Prendergast’s Modernist approach to painting. Its subject relates to his watercolor Central Park (1900, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) in which the artist “painted a row of park benches that extends across the entire width of the sheet, each bench filled with spectators, their backs to us as they take in the horse-drawn carriages parading before them.” In the present work, by contrast, “the bench is turned toward us, welcoming viewers into the scene to a greater degree. The picture presents a wonderful range of motion, from the women and girls striding side-saddle—moving to the left across the middle, and the horse carriages and pedestrians traveling to the right in the background…the orderly procession of elegant figures in The Bridle Path, Central Park commemorates a way of life that was soon to pass, for automobiles, which had first been allowed to drive through the park in 1899, would soon replace horse carriages.” (Maurice Prendergast: Paintings of America, New York, 2003, pp. 49-50)

The present work poignantly illustrates Prendergast's particular approach to composition, color and brushwork. Keenly aware of the Post-Impressionist's aesthetic attitudes of composition and space, Prendergast used an array of devices to emphasize the flatness of the surface, which in turn heightened the overall decorative effect. For the majority of Prendergast's New York watercolors, the artist used Central Park as his subject matter, although other sites such as Madison Square also attracted him. Prendergast's brushwork "takes on an abstract quality apart from the underlying forms they are supposed to define, moving in independent directions, and varying in size and shape. But, while obscuring and overriding those forms, they succeed in unifying the pictorial surface." ("Maurice B. Prendergast" in Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Charles Prendergast: A Catalogue Raisonné, p. 22) In The Bridle Path, Central Park, these variations in brushwork and color are freely expressed and enhance the textural quality and pattern of the work.

The present work illustrates the artist's lifelong interest in observing urbanity at rest, as well as his passion for color and composition. Bringing together several of Prendergast's favored devices and tools, this extraordinary watercolor reveals the artist's highly personalized approach to subject and style. Painted just after his pivotal trip to Italy and featuring the classic New York subject of Central Park, the present work exhibits Prendergast's predilection for capturing glimpses of picturesque crowds relishing a leisurely day expressed in a modern style uniquely his own.