“…I’m looking forward to the dusk with great excitement.”
(Zelda Fitzgerald in a letter to F.Scott Fitzgerald, April 1919)
Maurice Prendergast, Lady with a Red Sash, 1897
As I gaze and gaze at this gorgeous painting, I cannot pinpoint it clearly what is it about it that I love more; the wonderful dusky and dreamy colours, those shades of purple, so ephemeral, and that warm pulsating yellow of the street lamps, the rich vibrant cherry red of the lady’s sash. The yellow circles of the lantern’s glow remind me of the full yellow moon I gazed at this evening. And I love the lady in white who appears so fleeting and mysterious, with her back turned against the viewer. She is passing through the crowd, mingling with the people for a moment but remaining firmly in the rich world of her own. This very narrow canvas is only a part of her fascinating nocturnal world. This might likely be the most vertically elongated artwork that I’ve featured here on the blog. Such a strange canvas isn’t typical for Western art and it clearly shows the influence of Japanese art and Ukiyo-e prints on the Western artists in the late nineteenth century. I wonder, did the lady wait for the dust with anticipation; the sweetest moment of the day when the day surrenders to the night, the lanterns lighten, flowers are drunken with wild scents and the music colours the air in the cafes of La Belle Epoque Paris? It’s wonderful how the shape of the dress fits the narrow canvas so well, if the fin de siecle ladies wore crinolines, this kind of painting would have to be a triptych.
Maurice Prendergast studied in Paris from 1891 to 1895 at the Académie Colarossi (Modigliani’s lover and muse Jeanne Hébuterne also studied at this academy, though many years later) and Académie Julian. In Paris he met Aubrey Beardsley, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard with whom he shared artistic ideas and these friendships inspired him to experiment with compositions and formats of his paintings. The vertically elongated shape of this painting could have been take from one of Bonnard’s paintings. Despite returning to Boston in 1895, Prendergast’s four year stay in Paris certainly left a huge impact on his art and inspired him in many ways. After all, which artist could leave Paris and not be touched by its magic or be transformed by it completely?
This painting was painted in 1897 which means Prendergast wasn’t living in Paris anymore, but the painting definitely has a Parisian feel to it and reminds me a lot of the scenes in Woody Allen’s film “Midnight in Paris” (2011) when Gil and Adriana returns to the “glory days” of Paris, as Adriana sees it, the La Belle Epoque.
Byron's Muse 