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Fantasy displays Prendergast's fully mature oil style and his "daring musical genius" with color, which Duncan Phillips greatly admired. Fantasy presents a theme that preoccupied Prendergast during the last decade of his career: a crowd of people at leisure placed within an imaginary, densely forested landscape set against a bay; extending into the water is a promontory containing a house, more people, or trees. Though this theme recurs in a number of Prendergast’s works, including Autumn, Picnic, and Under the Trees, all in The Phillips Collection, there are variations among the paintings in the artist's technique. In Fantasy Prendergast has painted a quiet, stable composition using tight, measured brushstrokes in subdued colors. The scene is rendered as an open vista with an uninterrupted recession into space, as if he is presenting the viewer with space for imagination and fantasy.
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