Court Yard, West End Library, Boston

Prendergast painted a series of watercolors of Boston’s West End Library, restored since the early 1960s to its original use as the Old West Church. Here, the historic building and its courtyard bustling with patrons are arranged in bands, a recurring compositional choice of the artist. Prendergast’s interest in experimentation is apparent in the center foreground, where he outlined in graphite and wash the figures of a man and a young girl but never completed them.