Stars align for Prendergast exhibition at Williams

That’s only fitting, since those galleries will be home to “Prendergast in Italy.’’ The exhibition, which opens Saturday, consists of watercolors, monotypes, and drawings from Maurice Prendergast’s two visits to Italy, in 1898 and 1911. Also on display will be sketchbooks, letters, photographs, and even guidebooks Prendergast used during his travels. The show subsequently travels to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

“Prendergast in Italy,’’ which has been some two decades in the making, is something of a landmark. In part, that’s because of the visual richness of its content, with subjects including the Piazza San Marco in Venice, the Roman Campagna, and the Spanish Steps in Rome. In part, it’s because of the pivotal nature of the episodes it chronicles. The show focuses on two highly productive moments in the career of the much-loved American Post-Impressionist. They find him poised between traditionalism and Modernism, Old World and New, even Boston and New York. (Prendergast lived in Boston from 1868, when he was 10, until he moved to New York in 1914.)

“Prendergast in Italy’’ is “very important, and I’m really excited about it,’’ said Erica Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, which contributed eight pieces to the exhibition. “And it’s also going to be a drop-dead gorgeous show.’’

A mark of that importance is that the show includes items from more than 50 lenders. That’s a lot for any exhibition, let alone one organized by a college art museum. What makes the number even more impressive is that most of the loans are works on paper, which tend to be among the most fragile of artworks. Prendergast generally preferred watercolor and monotype to oil painting.

“We were able to get such amazing loans for this show,’’ Nancy Mowll Mathews said in a recent interview at her office at the museum. Mathews, who’s the Eugenie Prendergast Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art at the WCMA, co-curated the show. “With three venues and works on paper, you have to constantly switch them out. Well, we’re having 81 [items] in our venue, and close to 70 in the other two venues, which is an amazing response, incredibly generous on the part of the owners of these works - both private collectors and museums - to lend watercolors. Very often they say, ‘Absolutely not.’ They’re too fragile, too light sensitive - they’re too important!

“But they knew because we were doing it, that this was the show, and this [catalog] was the book. . . . So if they’re going to lend their precious object to one exhibition in this millennium, it’s going to be this one.’’

What makes the fact that it’s the WCMA behind the show so important is that the museum’s Prendergast Archive is the world’s largest collection of works by Maurice and his artist brother, Charles. The museum has approximately 400 items by them.

How did Williams come to dominate Prendergast studies? The answer can be found in Mathews’s title. Eugenie Prendergast was Charles’s widow (Maurice never married). She gave the museum some $32 million in art and money over the course of 15 years, prior to her death, in 1994.

“I met her when she was 90,’’ Mathews recalled. “She lived for another 10 years. Died at 100 - after having two 100th birthday parties, because we were afraid she wasn’t going to make it to 100!’’

Why Prendergast chose Williams as the recipient of her largess is something of a mystery, Mathews said.

“There was no Williams connection, no alums, no personal connection to the college. Although [legendary WCMA director S.] Lane Faison did cast a wide net in the world and reeled in all kinds of people and all kinds of things. People liked giving to Lane. So somehow in the late ’40s Mrs. Prendergast gave some Persian vases to Williams. We have no explanation for it.

“Over the years, as she began to be conscious of her mortality and the need to place the estate of Maurice and Charles Prendergast, she thought a museum would be the right place for these objects and archives. She had a very long relationship to the MFA. Everyone thought it was all going to go there. Eh, things happen. She got angry? They got angry? Finally, to make a long story short, it occurred to her if she wanted the collection and the archival materials to be used in an educational setting she should give it to an educational institution.’’

Eugenie Prendergast’s generosity led to Mathews’s catalogue raisonne of the Prendergasts’ work, published in 1990. It was around that time, Mathews recalled, that the idea of what would become “Prendergast in Italy’’ first took shape. “It’s the show everyone would want to do,’’ Mathews said. “It’s the best-known body of his work, and many people consider it the greatest.’’

The catalogue raisonne - an encyclopedic listing of all an artist’s known works - ultimately proved crucial in assembling “Prendergast in Italy,’’ said Elizabeth Kennedy, curator of collection at the Terra Foundation for American Art and co-curator of the show with Mathews. “Nancy came with her database in her brain,’’ Kennedy said by phone. “Not only the images but also the lenders.’’

“You have spent all this time locating these 2,500 works,’’ Mathews explained. “So if you’re doing ‘Prendergast in Italy’ you can go to your files and you know who the private collectors are who have them. Which is very difficult to find out if you had to start from scratch. Plus, over the years we’ve developed relationships with these collectors. People who collect Prendergast, or any other artist, like this artist. So we get to be friends with them.’’

A worthy idea for a show and a network of relationships with collectors are one thing. Funding is quite another. Mathews spent 15 years writing grant proposals. One problem was a strong desire to have any show of Prendergast’s Italian works exhibited there. The additional shipping and insurance expenses incurred by including an Italian venue would substantially raise the prospective show’s budget - as it turned out, by more than 10 percent (about $150,000, Mathews estimated, out of an overall cost of more than $1 million).

In a happy twist, it was the pursuit of an Italian site that finally helped get the show funded. The Terra Foundation not only has 61 Prendergast monotypes, the largest collection of any public institution. Its aim is to promote the international understanding of American art.

Kennedy laughed when it was suggested that the WCMA-Terra combination was a match made in heaven. “I’d like to give heaven credit, but Nancy and I were talking at [the annual meeting of the] College Art Association, we looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do something about Maurice.’ ’’

“It has to be sort of serendipitous,’’ Mathews said. “You work toward it. You try to figure out the ideal set of circumstances and work them all together. Obviously, it took 20 years. But it happened.’’

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney @globe.com.