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signed Prendergast, l.l. oil on canvas Painted circa 1914-15. Painted circa 1914-15, The Deer Park was executed after Prendergast's influential 1907 trip to Paris, where he encountered works exhibited by the French Post-Impressionists and the Fauves. While Prendergast was inspired by many of these revolutionary artists, it was Cezanne who had the most significant impact on Prendergast and his subsequent works. Before leaving Paris, Prendergast wrote to his brother Charles and to a Boston friend Mrs. Oliver Williams, "I have been extremely fortunate in regard to the exhibitions, not only in the spring with the Salons but Chardins, Fragonard, etc. and the delightful fall exhibitions which last during the month of October. They have all Paul Cézannes [at the Salon d'Automne]?Cezanne gets the most wonderful color, a dusty kind of a grey. And he had a water color exhibition late in the spring which was to me perfectly marvelous. He left everything to the imagination. They were great for their symplicity [sic] and suggestive qualities?. I was somewhat bewildered when I first got over here, but I think Cezanne will influence me more than the others. I think so now (Nancy Mowll Mathews, Maurice Prendergast, Williamstown, Massachusetts, William College Museum of Art, 1990, p. 25). The Deer Park fully incorporates Prendergast's new ideas about color and form, yet also returns to a theme he explored throughout his career?fashionable members of the leisure class enjoying themselves in an idyllic landscape. Like the Post-Impressionists, Prendergast emphasized the flatness of the picture plane, dividing the composition into horizontal bands of color and creating a mosaic-like design. He "applied a carefully worked out color scheme in small dabs of paint. The result is an overall open surface pattern that allows the light colors?underneath to shine through for a glowing luminous effect" (Matthews, p. 27). Prendergast's growing interest in fantasy is also evident in The Deer Park. Around 1914, the artist began to include fairy-tale like elements, such as the deer ambling among the crowd; Prendergast's innovative mosaic of paint and use of vibrant, jewel-like color further heightens this atmosphere of animation and delight. A contemporary critic reviewing works of this period wrote: "[Prendergast] is a serious and humble student of design, and marshals line and color into patterns of some intimacy and much interest?his work has rhythm and beauty and a quaintness of humor that go far to inveigle the ordinary observer into acceptance of an extraordinary piece of craftsmanship" (Matthews, p. 35).