Maxfield Parrish was an American artist of the first half of the 20th century. He became popular for his imaginary illustrations and prints produced for various periodicals and books as well as for landscapes, posters and murals. The main subject matters of his fantastical and colorful works were mythological scenes depicting giants, dragons, genies, centaurs and fabular kingdoms. One of his most known works is a painting titled ‘Daybreak’.
Background
Maxfield Parrish was born on July 25, 1870, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He was a son of Quakers Stephen Parrish, an accomplished painter and etcher in his own right, and Elizabeth Bancroft coming from a family of machinists. Both parents had artistic leanings. Raised in the artistic atmosphere, Maxfield who revealed his passion for drawing at an early childhood had to hide his own sketching talent because of the Quaker taboo against creating graven images. However, his parents encouraged their son’s natural aptitude for sketching.
Christened Frederick at birth, Maxfield Parrish was called Fred by friends and family. Entering the art world, he added his paternal grandmother's maiden name, Maxfield, to his own, and it was that name by which the rest of the world knew him.
Education
Maxfield Parrish received first artistic lessons from his parents at home. His father taught him the craft of painting and etching. In 1884, he was sent to Europe. During the two-years trip, Parrish visited England, Italy and France exploring the art and architecture of old masters. While in Paris, the young boy studied at Dr. Kornemann’s school. Then, Maxfield Parrish attended the Haverford School and in 1888 he entered Haverford College. While at Haverford, influenced by his mother, Parrish was determined to become an architect. Slowly, however, he found that his real talent lay in illustration: playful caricatures dominated much of the sketch work of his late teenage years.
After graduation from the college in 1892, Maxfield Parrish continued his training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He spent three years at the institution and was mentored by Robert William Vonnoh and Thomas Pollock Anshutz.
During the decade, Parrish searched for an instruction from Howard Pyle. The artist said that he had nothing to teach Parrish. However, Maxfield assisted a few of Pyle’s lectures at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science & Industry (currently Drexel University) in 1893.
The start of Maxfield Parrish’s long and successful career can be counted from the middle of 1890s when he started doing different magazine covers. His first was for Harper's Weekly. In 1897 Parrish illustrated his first book, Mother Goose in Prose by Lyman Frank Baum, who was still a few years away from discovering Oz. One of Parrish's specialties became the illustrating of children's books, and over the next decade he provided imaginative pictures for The Golden Age and Dream Days by Kenneth Grahame, Poems of Childhood by Eugene Field, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Arabian Nights. Parrish's work was marked by strong veins of sentimentality and dreamy unreality. He frequently turned to legends, such as those in the Arabian Nights, for his subject matter.
He was in large demand as a magazine artist from the 1890s into the 1930s. One checklist of his magazine covers and illustrations includes nearly four hundred items. Parrish turned out numerous covers for Century Magazine, Life, Harper's Bazaar, and Collier's. He collaborated with the latter from 1904 to 1913. His work was also to be seen in Scribner's, McClure's, Ladies' Home Journal, and St. Nicholas. In addition, the artist did commercial work for a wide range of advertising accounts. These included Jell-O, Wannamaker's, Oneida Silver, H. O. Oats, Columbia Bicycle, Royal Baking Powder, and Swift's Premium Ham. Often he made use of fantasy and fairy tale elements in these pictures, utilizing knights in armor, fantastic palaces, jesters, kings, princesses, dwarfs, goddesses, and nursery rhyme characters.
Probably the most financially rewarding area was the color reproductions of Parrish's paintings that were sold by such distributors as House of Art.
At the age of forty, Maxfield Parrish tried his hand for the first time as a muralist. The most famous mural was Old King Cole, painted for the Hotel Knickerbocker. In addition, he painted The Pied Piper for the men's bar in San Francisco's Palace Hotel and Sing a Song of Sixpence for Chicago's Sherman House. His most ambitious undertaking was a series of 18 murals, each over ten feet high, done for the offices of The Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. Parrish worked from 1911 to 1913 on the project.
Five years later, the artist started another illustration project which he had worked on till 1934. There were the pictures to decorate the calendar for General Electric
By 1931 the artist tired of "Girl-on-Rock" paintings. He concentrated on landscape painting. Although he did accept an offer to paint landscapes for the greeting card company Brown & Bigelow in 1934, he was mostly free to paint as he pleased. His landscapes included many paintings of farmhouses, old mills, and small town churches and continued to exhibit the artist's meticulous rendering and his fascination with the effects of light. Although the canvases had no such popularity as his earlier, they provided the artist with a sufficient income.
Maxfield Parrish spent the most part of his life living and working at his house ‘The Oaks’ in Cornish, New Hampshire. The artist stopped painting in 1960, at the age of 90. In 1965 the Metropolitan Museum of Art finally took notice of him and purchased one of his fantasy paintings, The Errant Pan.
Achievements
Maxfield Parrish was a distinguished illustrator whose artworks made a great contribution to the development of world art. A prolific artist, Parrish created about nine hundred works, including calendars, postcards, and magazine covers which provided him with a status of one of the most desirable cover artists in the United States.
During his career, which lasted about fifty years, he received many awards and honorable mentions, including an Honorary mention at Paris Universal Exposition, Silver Medal at Pan-American Exposition, Gold Medal from Architectural League of New York and other notable rewards.
The style of Maxfield Parrish remained influential for culture and further coming generations of artists after his death, such as Norman Rockwell and Andy Warhol. Many of Parrish’s artworks were digitalized.
The image of Parrish was used on one of the special post stamps of 2001 commemorating American illustrators. Parrish blue hue was named in the artist’s honor.
A lot of artworks by Maxfield Parrish were widely used by many artists from various fields, including cartoon makers and musicians who applied Parrish’s canvases to decorate the covers of their works. So, Bloom County cartoon collection of 1985 called Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things was composed of the elements borrowed from Daybreak, The Garden of Allah, and The Lute Players. The creators of the poster for The Princess Bride were inspired by Daybreak too.
Such musicians as Elton John, The Moody Blues band and Enya featured Parrish’s pieces of art on their album cover or in their videos as Michael Jackson did in his music video of 1995 ‘You Are Not Alone’ showing his then-wife, Lisa Marie Presley, semi-nude emulating Daybreak.
Nowadays, the richest collection of Maxfield Parrish’s heritage, sixty-nine pieces, is held at the National Museum of American Illustration. Some work can also be seen at the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, the Cornish Colony Museum in Windsor, Vermont and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
In 2006, the best-selling art print of all time by Parrish, ‘Daybreak’, was purchased at Christie's in New York City for $7,632,000.
The Chefs at the Table: Heading for The Knave of Hearts
The Knave of Hearts
The Knave of Hearts
Puss in Boots
The Sugar Plum Tree
Sing a Song of Sixpence
painting
Cardinal Archbishop Sat on His Shaded Balcony
Reveries
At Close of Day
Cascades (Quiet Solitude)
Daniels Farm, Summer
Loneliness
Autumn Brook
Sheep Pasture, Cornish, New Hampshire
Summer
Grand Canyon
The Dinky Bird
Garden of Allah
White Birch
Afterglow
Hill Top Farm, Winter
Birches in Winter
Road to the Valley
Air Castles
Moonlight
Contentment
The Lantern Bearers
Romance
Stars
Ecstasy
Moonlight Night: Winter
Daybreak
Views
Quotations:
"The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space."
"It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color."
"How do ideas come? What a question! If they come of their own accord, they are apt to arrive at the most unexpected time and place."
"Modernistic-Abstractionist-Art... consists of 75% explanation and 25% God knows what!"
"I don't know what people find or like in me, I'm hopelessly commonplace! Current appreciation of my work is a bit highbrow, I've always considered myself a popular artist."
Membership
Society of American Artists
,
United States
1900
National Academy of Design
,
United States
Personality
Maxfield Parrish was an intelligent and charismatic person. He liked the financial side of his activity but almost never sent money for burn.
Quotes from others about the person
"Maxfield Parrish was certainly one of our most prominent illustrators and hardly a home in America existed that didn’t have a Maxfield Parrish print."
"However rationalistic his motives, Parrish's elaborately artificial methods give his pictures a good deal of aura and a surrealistic, even slightly hallucinogenic feeling, which puts an odd spin on the otherwise generically picturesque imagery and its cliched eulogizing of the rural past. If you discovered them unlabeled in the right contemporary gallery, you might mistake them for essays in postmodern duplicity. But Parrish himself was innocent of ironic intent, and the heartfelt romance and hard-won beauty of his calendar-art vision offers a gratifying break from late-modernist cynicism. What Parrish made may have been kitsch, but it was great kitsch."
Interests
Jay Hambidge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry
Connections
Maxfield Parrish met his future wife, Lydia Ambler Austin, a painter and instructor, while studying at Drexel Institute of Art, Science & Industry (currently Drexel University). Maxfield and Lydia married on June 1, 1895. The marriage produced three boys named Dillwyn, Maxfield, Stephen, and one girl Jean.
The youngest child served as a model for Parrish’s painting ‘Ecstasy’. Jean followed her parents’ steps and became an artist.
Living with Lydia, Parrish had also romantic relationships with Susan Lewin, the housekeeper of the family home, The Oaks, in Cornish, New Hampshire. She served as a model for many of Parrish’s canvases, including ‘Sleeping Beauty’.
After Parrish’s wife death, Susan expected Parrish to marry her. There was no proposal and she formed a family with her childhood boyfriend. A ninety-year-old artist who still worked actively on canvases completely stopped to paint.
Maxfield Parrish: The Secret Letters
This fascinating story is based on 323 previously unknown handwritten letters that the artist wrote during the years of 1936 to 1941 to a young, intellectual, and beautiful woman with whom he fell madly in love late in his career
