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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Children in the Tree, 1911, Maurice Prendergast...do you see the children? look closely


“In 1907, Prendergast was invited to exhibit with the Eight, colleagues of Robert Henri and exponents of the Ashcan school. Prendergast and the romantic symbolist Arthur B. Davies seem oddly mismatched to these urban realists, but all were united in an effort to stir the American art scene out of its conservative lethargy.
In 1913 he was invited to participate in the famed Armory Show, which was largely arranged by his friend Davies. Not surprisingly, Prendergast's brilliantly unorthodox offerings were decried as resembling "an explosion in a paint factory." On the same occasion Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) was similarly deplored as "an explosion in a shingle factory," suggesting either a failure of critical imagination or a case of collegial plagiarism. But of the Americans represented there, Prendergast's works were the most thoroughly modern and postimpressionist.
Who can now pass a playground teeming with brightly dressed children or wander through a public park where the varicolored garb of its occupants does not call to mind the stirring images Maurice Prendergast has left us? As Oscar Wilde once ventured, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
Emery Battis Artist Biographies for the exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)