Long Prayer Stick

Flowers in a Vase is one of approximately ten canvases painted by Maurice Prendergast between 1910 and 1913 that feature a simple tabletop arrangement of flowers. In these he synthesized his understanding of the art of the French artists Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse to arrive at his own decorative Post-Impressionist style. He used deliberate, broadly applied strokes of a paint-loaded brush to describe both form and space--a technique that creates an allover surface of patterns reminiscent of a mosaic.