Large Boston Public Garden Sketchbook: A Woman Reading a Book
Maurice Brazil Prendergast American
Not on view
This finely dressed young woman, apparently shaded from sunlight by her crimson parasol, may be reading a Thomas Hardy novel. Several of his books were newly published and popularized in London and New York in the 1890s. Prendergast deftly uses the watercolor medium to illustrate both transparency, as in the leg-of-mutton sleeves of the dress, and opacity, as in the saturated crimson palette of the dahlias in a vase. His ultramarine blue framing lines appear on almost all the watercolors in this sketchbook.
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