Keen Eye, Staccato Brush

Slideshow


As he traveled through Italy, the painter focused on details of place, recording with bold strokes not only characteristic buildings or how the distinctive ruddy, lozenge-shaped sails of Venetian fishing boats punctuate an expanse of blue water, but also such specifics as the way Venetian women drape their shawls. His eye was equally acute for qualities of light, as he conjured up the subtleties of changing seasons, times of day and weather with a nuanced palette. In "Prendergast in Italy," the moist gray radiance of early spring in the Mediterranean is suggested in watercolors made during a trip south to escape the cold and damp of a Venetian winter, but mostly the sun shines, skies are dazzlingly blue, flags stir in gentle breezes and water sparkles in detached patterns of light and dark.

Even rain elicits delicious images. A shower provides shimmering reflections in the wet pavement of the Piazza San Marco: the basilica's complex façade, with its rows of stacked columns, lunettes and glittering mosaics, fuses with the figures milling in front of the splendid doors. A more ­determinedly rainy day offers an excuse to translate water and pavement, gondolas, and pedestrians huddled under black umbrellas into a tasty ­orchestration of beiges, grays and cool gray-blue. But we see far more parasols than umbrellas in Prendergast's ­Venice, bold spots of color that form a cheerful, tossing canopy above the throngs swarming over the arched bridges, all of it turned into rapid touches of ­unmodulated hues distilled from the sunlight reflected from the ­canals.

In my experience, Mexico offers as beautiful a landscape and rich an architectural heritage as Italy, but it has nothing to equal Venice. What country does? As far as I know, Venice is unique.

The fine selection in "Prendergast in Italy" draws upon the large collection given to Williams by the widow of the artist's brother and that of the show's joint organizer, the ­Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art. What's perhaps most remarkable about the exhibited works is that no matter how familiar or potentially "touristic" Prendergast's subjects, his images are never predictable or trite. However much a view of the Grand Canal resonates with our own experience of Venice, it engages us most deeply as a painting. "Prendergast in Italy" is worth a detour, as the Michelin guides say.


Williams College Museum of Art