 Hi everybody, welcome to another Barnes takeout. My name is Kaylyn Jewel. I am senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation. And today I wanted to spend some time with everybody in gallery number six, which you see on the screen here. It's a fabulous gallery as are all of our 23 galleries at the Barnes Foundation. But this one has an interesting network of paintings that are on display on the south wall, which is the wall we are looking at right now. We zoom in just a little bit and spend a moment or two looking at this ensemble. Again, as Dr. Barnes referred to these displays, he referred to them as ensembles. And he's arranging these pictures in a symmetrical way, which I think everybody can see here. We've got this nice sense of a central line that goes all the way down through the middle. And then on either side of that, we see pairings. For example, we've got candlesticks paired on either side of this Pennsylvania German chest. We've got two paintings of outdoor scenes on either side of this great Paul Gauguin painting in the center. We've got these two fabulously fleshy nude ladies by painted by Renoir. And then we've got some smaller studies up above, in addition to all of the great metalwork that we have. But I want to spend some time looking at this picture here. Which sits to the right of this great painting by Paul Gauguin. And the two pictures that you see flanking the Gauguin painting are painted by an American painter named Maurice Prendergast. And Maurice Prendergast was from Canada, he was born in Canada, and he immigrated to the United States, specifically to Boston, at the end of the 19th century. And he spent a lot of time traveling the world. He spent time in Italy, he spent time in France. And while he was there, he started to pick up sort of inspiration of artistic styles by different artists. Artists like Paul Gauguin that we have in the center here. And also artists like Georges Serrat that we have represented here and here. So let's take a closer look at this painting here by Maurice Prendergast. So here is the picture. It was painted in 1914, 1915, it's oil on canvas. The title is simply Beach Scene with Donkeys or Mules, which is taken from the fact that we've gotten a couple of figures who are riding on top of a couple of animals that look to be donkeys or mules based on their long ears that you see there. The whole scene is taking place on a beach. You can see figures who are sort of sitting on the rocks. You've got a couple of figures here reclining. Here is another figure reclining over here. We've got some people who are standing, some people who seem to be maybe walking along with the donkeys in the background. We've got different ages of people. So it looks like we have a child here, this darker figure here. We even have maybe a dog down here at the bottom of the picture. All of this seems to be kind of a visual screen that is set before a watery landscape in the background, which you can see is rendered in shades of blue and green that kind of pop between the standing figures and even these donkeys. In the extreme distance, you can sort of see what appears to be a couple of sailboats and there appears to be another boat over here as well on the left side of the picture. The sky is framed by these two great trees. So here we can see just the barest hint of the top of the tree trunk here that reaches into the sky. And then on the other side, we don't see the tree trunk but we see its branches sort of reaching into the picture plane. And so one of the things that I think is really fabulous about this picture, number one are the colors. The colors are very similar to the color palette of Gauguin, you could say. You can see that when you look at it in gallery six. And also it's the way that the artist applied the oil paint to the canvas. He's done so, and if we zoom in here to this tree, he's done so by dabbing color onto the canvas in little dots. And this technique is sort of similar, at least theoretically, to a technique that was developed about 30 years earlier by an artist named Georges Serrat, a technique called pointillism. And that pointillist aesthetic was something that Maurice Prendergast absolutely adored when he was spending time in places like the Louvre in Paris when he was studying the great paintings by artists like Georges Serrat and also Paul Gauguin. And while he was in Europe, we know that he also spent some time in Italy. And while he was in Italy, he was deeply inspired by medieval frescoes, Renaissance paintings, and also Byzantine mosaics, like you see in some of the churches in the city of Venice. And we know that he spent a good amount of time studying these mosaics, making representations of them in both watercolor and later on in oil. And we know that he even was interested in purchasing a whole, essentially a box full of glass tessera, the little square pieces and using that to create a mosaic that he made in the 1890s. So we know that the aesthetics of both pointillism and medieval or you could say Byzantine mosaic making was something that Maurice Prendergast was really, really, really in love with. Let's go back to the main ensemble and think about it in connection to that little Surat picture that you have here. So if we zoom in, you can see that Surat has represented a couple of sailboats on the sea and he's dabbed paint onto the canvas in this quick little oil study that he has done. It's not visually too unlike what we have happening down here in the Prendergast picture. In every one of the galleries at the Barnes Foundation, there are at least two works of art by American artists. And we know that Dr. Barnes was very interested in having the foundation be a source of inspiration for American artists. And it's no surprise that he has nearly or over 20 pictures by the artist Maurice Prendergast. Dr. Barnes was friends with Maurice Prendergast and Maurice Prendergast was also friends with Dr. Barnes's great pal William Glackens. So it's sort of an interesting collection of people who kind of show up when you start to look at these ensembles a little bit more carefully. So when you come back to the Barnes Foundation, go into gallery six and spend some time with these great colorful and almost shimmering paintings by Maurice Prendergast. They're really, really fabulous, I think. Thank you for joining me for the takeout today and join us for another one tomorrow and feel free to leave comments down below. We love hearing from you guys. Thank you, take care. I'm Tom Collins, new Bauer family, executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. 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