Landscape and Waterways

Maier Museum of Art

This grouping features three paintings by American artists who explored elements of leisure in nature. American Abstractionist Milton Avery’s Amusement Park (ca. 1929) captures the game stalls of Coney Island in muted hues. It playfully portrays fully clothed visitors, with a sunbathing male odalisque in the foreground, evoking other subtly humorous scenes of Coney Island visitors that Avery painted over the next few years.

Elihu Vedder’s The Old Well, Bordighera evinces creative liberties the artist took in constructing scenes of the natural world. Vedder first painted this picturesque scene of an abandoned mill in the popular 19th-century tourist destination over a decade prior, employing loose brushwork to capture the sparse vegetation surrounding the deteriorating structure. This 1879 rendition reimagines the first composition in greater detail, set within a dense forest, to form a unified vision of abundance and decay that reflects Vedder’s prioritization of romantic impressions of nature over strict adherence to reality.

Maurice Prendergast’s Yacht Race (ca. 1902–1904) is one of his hallmark depictions of idyllic seaside leisure, featuring a sunny coastal scene in which colorfully dressed figures watch boats on the bright blue water. In decades prior, Prendergast observed how the decline of maritime industries and emergence of the leisure economy transformed New England coastlines into spaces for pleasure. While engaging with modernist experimentation through the work of Cézanne and Matisse, Prendergast’s seaside paintings, such as Yacht Race, advance a distinct vision of modern American recreation.

Source: Joshua C. Taylor, “Perceptions and Digressions” in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, eds. Carroll S. Clark and Louise Heskett (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,1979), 91.

Curatorial note: Vedder’s The Old Well, Bordighera (1879) is reproduced in Perceptions and Evocations under the title Old Mill Wheel, Bordighera.