| As a painter
and illustrator, few American artists have enjoyed the wide popularity
of Maxfield Parrish, both during his life and up to this day. It is said
that in the 1920s and 1930s that 25% of all American homes had at least
one Maxfield Parrish print hanging in the home. Maxfield Parrish created
art that could be enjoyed by everyone, for it adorned advertisements, calendars,
magazines, and books not to mention his original oil paintings. Parrish
works were notable both for their luminescent use of color as well as for
the themes which he unique captured, from landscapes to nudes.
Maxfield Parrish was originally born Frederick
Parrish in 1870 into the artistic Philadelphia family of Stephen and Elizabeth
Parrish. His father worked as an artist, and he introduced his son to art
history, museums, and fine architecture. He traveled to Europe with his
father, adorning his letters home with his own illustrations of what he
had seen. Later, he lived with his father at a Massachusetts colony for
artists after dropping out of Haverford College. Later, he continued his
education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and became interested
in the illustrations of Howard Pyle; soon, he developed his own unique
style as he pursued a career as an illustrator himself. Parrish had a fertile
imagination, and he used it to create vibrant fantasy images in bold colors.
He was particularly fond of all the hues of blue but especially what became
known as "Parrish Blue", and he experimented with glazes to give the work
a luminescent, glowing quality. His sense of scale and proportion gave
his carefully designed work a larger than life quality that people loved.
Maxfield Parrish c. 1900 |
A Maxfield Parrish work was first to decorate
the cover of Harpers Weekly magazine when he was only 25 years old, and
he also painted murals such as his unique depiction of "Old King Cole"
for a University of Pennsylvania theatre club. Early paintings were reproduced
in books and popular magazines such as The Century, Life, and Ladies Home
Journal. Parrish may be best known not for his paintings and murals but
rather for his calendars, first produced for the Edison Mazda Company which
was later to become part of General Electric. The public eagerly awaited
the publication of the yearly calendars, cropping them to hang on walls
and in frames-- a terrific advertising success for the company. Parrish
worked at an estate he called "The Oaks" in Cornish, New Hampshire in a
house he built largely himself-- excited to put his architectural studies
to practical use. Cornish became a local artist colony toward the turn
of the century, thanks to Parrish's rapidly expanding set of friends and
colleagues who were attracted to his unique blend of artistic talent and
intellect.
Demand for Parrish illustrations
was so strong that he always maintained a strong pipeline of
commissions and earned large sums of money for the day. He bored
of the constraints of producing work for advertising, and he
wanted to concentrate on producing paintings specifically with
the intent of high quality lithographic print reproduction.
In 1922, he produced his most famous and popular work "Daybreak."
This scene is comprised of his daughter Jean and her friend
Kitty Own, the daughter of the orator William Jennings Bryan.
Like many Parrish works of this period, the girls are superimposed
in a fantasy scene of vibrant colors and a type of sheen which
was unique to Parrish. Later in life, he produced a series of
lovely landscapes for Brown & Bigelow calendars published
between 1937 and 1962. Maxfield Parrish continued working on
an array of work until he turned 70 years old, enjoying spending
time with his long time model and girlfriend Susan Lewin. He
died 25 years later in 1966 at the age of 95, still at his New
Hampshire estate which he had called home for so many years.
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