Maurice Prendergast’s trip to Venice in 1898 was tremendously important to the artist, his career, and, in turn, to the genesis of modern American art. The Boston painter Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867-1945) was a friend of Prendergast’s, and, despite belonging to a distinctly more conservative circle of art, Murphy championed both his friend’s work and northern Italy, hoping to make a match. In 1898, Prendergast moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, along with his brother Charles, to live in proximity of Murphy, and their friendship was close. The difference between the work of Murphy and of Maurice Prendergast encapsulates the critical juncture in art history. Murphy’s work was very much in the stamp of John Singer Sargent and other Boston-area painters of the late nineteenth-century. Prendergast was a practitioner of something that might be called Impressionism, but his tile-like application of patches of watercolor speaks to a distinctly modernist perspective. Murphy made a gift of two books to Prendergast that year: the first, a copy of the James Abbott McNeill Whistler memoir, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890), demonstrated the milieu from which the artists sprang. The second pointed a way forward for Prendergast: Karl Baedeker’s 1895 guidebook, Handbook for Travelers: Northern Italy. Whistler’s own works from Venice would have been on view in Boston at the time, underscoring the desirability of Venice as an ideal artist destination. Sarah Choate Sears (1858-1935), the Boston-based patron of Sargent and Mary Cassatt, bankrolled the artist, likely with a $500 advance—she acquired five major pictures upon his return [Nancy Mowll Matthews, Prendergast in Italy (2009), p. 28]. By the end of June of that year, Prendergast’s passport was in order and he set sail soon thereafter.

“In so many of Prendergast’s Italian watercolors, abstract lines of composition are breathtaking in their power,” observes Matthews [p. 57]. She continues, citing the present work as an exemplar case of Prendergastian design:

They can take the form of a strong horizontal series of zones, as in Venetian Palaces on the Grand Canal…or the vertical lines of the two fondamente, or quays, opposite each other at either end of the Rialto Bridge…When compared with Sargent’s similar fragmentary view…we see how extreme Prendergast’s simplification and geometric abstraction were at a time when others were striving for the same thing. It is not surprising to see in his sketchbook…a series of phrases all featuring the word “Design,” as though he were casting about for a title for book he planned to write on the subject [Ibid., p. 60].

Indeed, the elements of abstract design, along with Prendergast’s trademark dappling of impressionist color, comes into its mature state with works such as Venetian Palaces on the Grand Canal. While he may have been succeeding at something his colleagues were merely attempting, Prendergast set himself apart with a unique voice that looked forward rather than backward.

Margaret M. Lovell, in a survey of American views of Venice, describes the present work:

Less symmetrical than the facades of San Marco, the clock tower, or the Doge's Palace in the other works in [Prendergast's Venetian watercolors], this group of palace fronts is leveled and regularized by the abrupt deletion of a fourth story from the largest and oldest building, the thirteenth-century Ca da Mosto. By establishing this even, flat skyline, Prendergast emphasizes and unifies his disparate subjects [Margaret M. Lovell, Venice: The American View, 1860-1920, p. 88].

She identifies further buildings in the work,

the group includes the fifteenth-century Palazzo Dolfin with its Gothic arched windows and the sixteenth-century Palazzo Bolani on the right [occupying] a prominent position on the Grand Canal just north of the Rialto Bridge. Although it appears that Prendergast observed and recorded this scene from a boat, he in fact stood on the open square near Venice's food markets across the Grand Canal [Ibid.].

When the Venetian pictures were exhibited at Macbeth Gallery in 1900, they represented Prendergast’s first solo exhibition in New York. They were a glowing success: “Maurice B. Prendergast’s watercolors and monotypes at the Macbeth Gallery form one of the most interesting and unconventional exhibitions now on view in the city [as quoted in Matthews (2009), p. 17]. Prendergast gloried in the attention: “Mr. Macbeth likes them [and] said he never had anything like them on his walls before” [Ibid.].