In 1914 Prendergast moved to New York, and over the last decade of his life he created his most formally complex and ambitious oils. He rarely dated his works, making it difficult to establish a certain chronology, but his efforts culminated in a series of monumental, almost totemic, paintings from about 1918 onward, of which Picnic by the Inlet is a prime example. Though in many ways similar to works of just a few years earlier, it more obviously asserts its reality as paint on a flat surface. The figures loom larger than they did earlier, filling more of the composition and rising higher in it, so that they overlap the background sky. Spatial recession is forcibly denied by brushwork that is unmodulated and equally vigorous all over the surface of the canvas.
Forms overlap unpredictably, blurring the distinctions between near and far space.
Prendergast's interlocking and overlapping mosaic of richly textured pigment creates a vibrant and shimmering surface, but the tightly controlled composition locks forms securely in space and prevents their disintegration.