Summer, New England 1912

Maurice Prendergast made this painting, Summer, New England, with thick strokes of oil paint on canvas. It’s like he captured a moment in time, but not in a photograph kind of way. Instead, each dab of color feels like a little observation, a note about light and shadow. Look at how the paint is built up, almost like mosaic tiles, to create the figures and the landscape. There is a real materiality in the way the canvas is worked. It’s neither hidden nor celebrated, but it is present. I think of Seurat and his pointillist paintings, or even some of the early Fauves like Matisse. But Prendergast has his own rhythm, a kind of broken, syncopated beat that makes you feel the energy of a summer day. The painting embraces the ambiguity of vision itself, reminding us that seeing is never a fixed or objective thing, but a fluid and ever-changing process.