Sketchbook, page 033: Notes

Maurice Prendergast

Cleveland Museum of Art

The image shows a yellowed piece of lined paper with handwritten text in black ink. The paper appears aged, with signs of wear around the edges and a small tear in the top-right corner. The handwriting is cursive and fills the page from top to bottom, left to right, in sentences and phrases. The text reads: "The Signs of Genius is the power of recognising and assimilating that which is necessary to the development of our self. The Marrow barren Soul is marrow and barren because it cannot acquire. We come into the world with nothing in our own right except the capacity for the acquisition of Ideas we cannot invent Ideas we can only get them in circulation some of them beginning of the world we endow them with the color and form of our own time". The page number "33" is written in the bottom-right corner. The background is dark gray.