Prendergast paints the city beautiful. (Current and Coming).(Maurice Brazil Prendergast, painting, Adelson Galleries, New York, New York)

The productive career of the American artist Maurice Brazil Prendergast is difficult to categorize. Some of his watercolors and paintings can be allied with a specific style, while others fall outside the prevailing artistic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An exhibition on view at Adelson Galleries in New York City from May 16 to June 20 surveys Prendergast's career in terms of the themes and subject matter that preoccupied him during the course of his life. Entitled Maurice Prendergast: Paintings of America, the show comprises more than fifty watercolors and oil paintings.

Prendergast embarked on his career in Boston at the turn of the twentieth century, when the cities of the United States were undergoing a sea change. It was an era in city planning often referred to as the city beautiful movement, which had as one of its central aims the transformation of sprawling urban centers into total works of art where architecture, landscape, and transportation networks were hanmonious.

Practitioners such as Frederick Law Olmsted had been developing parks for Boston and New York City with the single purpose of providing beautiful open spaces accessible to the entire population, especially the impoverished who could not afford to escape the sweltering heat of summer. Prendergast found ideal subjects in these parks, which comprise one of the thematically arranged sections of this exhibition. These paintings of urban and seaside parks often include a park bench or an orange-red umbrella; New England barbors, villages, and rocky shores; and finally children at play and women by the seashore.

The Canadian-born Prender-gast moved with his parents to Boston in the late 1860s, and there, after leaving school at age fourteen, he worked in a commercial art firm. From about 1891 to 1894 he was in Paris, ...