The Flying Horses

Drawn to colorful scenes of people enjoying themselves at the beach or at the park, Maurice Prendergast often sketched at the coastal resort of Nahant, near Boston. He adapted some of these sketches into paintings. Here he captures the excitement, the whirl of movement, and burst of color of a carousel with his broad brushstrokes and simplified forms. Responding to developments in French painting, he all but eliminates any sense of spatial depth, melding background and foreground to create decorative patterns of shapes and colors.