Sunlight on the Piazzetta

Created during Prendergast's transformative eighteen-month stay in Italy, this watercolor captures the Piazzetta di San Marco in Venice bathed in brilliant afternoon light. Using flat, mosaic-like patches of intense color and simplified forms, Prendergast dissolves the architecture and crowds into a shimmering, jewel-toned surface that owes as much to Byzantine mosaic as to French Post-Impressionism. The composition is busy but harmonious, with figures, flags, columns, and paving all treated as equally weighted elements of color and pattern. Prendergast was the first American artist to fully absorb the lessons of European Post-Impressionism, and his Venice watercolors — eleven of which he exhibited at the Boston Watercolor Club in 1899 — mark the moment American modernism began in earnest. The work is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.