Promenade Salem 1920

Maurice Prendergast made ‘Promenade Salem’ with oil on canvas. Look at how the scene vibrates with these tiny strokes of contrasting color, like so many little confetti dots. I like to think he applied them intuitively, responding to the light, the breeze, the chatter of the people in real time. Imagine the experience of painting this! Being surrounded by all these figures, the challenge of synthesizing the landscape and the crowd, translating movement and atmosphere with dabs of color. Maybe he kept his setup light so he could move quickly, capturing the fleeting moment. See the way he uses these little dashes of paint to describe the forms. They're almost abstract on their own, but when you step back they create a vivid, lively scene. It reminds me a bit of Vuillard, how he built up the surface of his paintings with so much layered detail. I think painters like Prendergast and Vuillard taught us how to see the world in broken colors.