Maxfield Parrish (1870‱966), a supremely talented artist and extraordinary entrepreneur, occupies a special niche in the history of America’s culture. Over the course of a 70-year career, stretching from the late Gilded Age to the Vietnam era, his illustrations, advertisements, posters, paintings and murals †utilizing an idiosyncratic combination of jewel-like, often luminescent colors, precise details, compositional balance and whimsical, sometimes surrealistic, images †made him one of the most popular artists of his time. Although his work deliberately appealed to popular tastes, it was grounded on sound aesthetic considerations.
In his work, Parrish combined a mastery of technique with canny knowledge of the rapid technological advances taking place in color printing. His technical brilliance allowed him to develop unique glazing processes and incandescent color effects, including his own “Parrish blue” †that gave his work a mysterious, lyrical quality.
His ability to exploit new, high-quality refinements in color printing processes allowed for meticulously detailed and brilliantly illuminated images and facilitated mass dissemination of his inventive pictures. In creating works that were part illustration and part fine art †iconic images that appeal to this day †he defined a new role for graphic artists.
In the 1920s, Parrish produced imagery of such popularity that it was estimated that one of every four American homes had reproductions of his world of make-believe hanging on its walls. Because he was unabashedly a “popular” or “public” artist, creating works for the masses, however, the art establishment tended to look down on his achievements. Toward the end of his long life and for several decades after his death, his work was denigrated and neglected, but in recent years it has regained respect from art historians and commanded large prices on the market.
All this makes “Fantasies and Fairy-Tales: Maxfield Parrish and the Art of the Print,” organized and circulated by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington, D.C., especially timely. Already seen in Sacramento, Wichita, Wilmington and Shreveport, it is on view at the Everson Museum of Art through July 11.
The exhibition poses questions such as, What is the place of artists, such as Parrish, whose careers are devoted to art for the general public? Should so-called commercial art be taken seriously by critics and scholars? This show, the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s oeuvre in the print media, suggests the answer to the latter is a firm yes.
Frederick Parrish was born in Philadelphia, the son of Quaker parents. He later adopted the family name Maxfield as his professional name. His father, Stephen (1846‱938), a painter better known as an etcher, gave him art lessons and took him on art tours to Europe, where the budding artist was particularly impressed by Pre-Raphaelite art.
After attending Haverford College for three years, in 1892, Parrish enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, studying under Thomas Anshutz and Robert Vonnoh. In his early 20s, Parrish decorated the new home of the University of Pennsylvania’s Mask and Wig Club in Philadelphia, a venerable theatrical group known for its spirited musical comedies. The centerpiece of his fairy-tale designs, the mural “Old King Cole,” was later replicated in an 8-by-30-foot version for John Jacob Astor’s Knickerbocker Hotel. Today, it graces the bar/lounge of Manhattan’s St Regis Hotel.
In 1895, Parrish married Lydia Austin, a young art instructor at the Drexel Institute, where Parrish attended lectures by the father of American illustration, Howard Pyle. Pyle, after reportedly telling the precocious young artist that there was nothing more he could teach him, encouraged him to develop his own style.
In 1898, the Parrishes established a permanent residence in Plainfield, N.H., near his parents’ place, and adjacent to the celebrated artists’ community in Cornish. Parrish became an active figure in the lively Cornish colony that gathered around sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and painter Thomas W. Dewing.
Warm, witty and handsome, Parrish was also stubborn, self-deprecating and private. Living to make art, he found the New Hampshire country location offered him the privacy and exposure to nature he needed. Although a reticent soul, he became a national celebrity.
At the outset of his career, critics were impressed with Parrish’s inventiveness and technical skills. As distinguished artist John La Farge wrote, “I know of no artist today, no matter how excellent, with such a frank imagination, within a beautiful form, as is the gift of Mr Parrish.”
By the 1920s, Parrish was the highest-paid artist in America, turning out an enormous number of popular illustrations for books and such magazines as Century, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal and Scribner’s. His astute manipulation of formal layering and optical effects and his ability to render subjects in compelling, bold lines and flat colors were reflected in images he created under a lucrative contract with Collier’s, 1904‱911. “The Idiot ,” with its polka-dotted clad reader, and “The Lantern Bearers,” depicting Pierrot-like figures hanging bright orange orbs, are appealing 1910 lithographs that reflect these qualities.
Equally acclaimed were illustrations for books such as L. Frank Baum’s Mother Goose in Prose, 1897, Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, 1897, and Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904. For Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood, he created “The Dinkey Bird,” 1904, an image that came to symbolize youthful abandon for generations of viewers.
Although Thomas Eakins had left the Pennsylvania Academy before Parrish arrived there, the younger man was influenced by the manner in which the older artist employed photography in creating paintings, and followed that example in his own work.
After taking pictures and developing the film, he projected images on glass slides with a magic lantern against a wall or board as he composed works. His inventory included numerous photos of himself, his young daughter, Jean, and Susan Lewin, a local woman, who had joined the Parrish household as a 16-year-old, live-in maid.
Outgoing, attractive and somewhat androgynous, Lewin modeled for the Pre-Raphaelite-inspired “Land of Make Believe,” circa 1905, and the male figure for “Rubaiyat,” 1917. She maintained a nearly five-decade intimate relationship with Parrish, 20 years her senior, serving as housekeeper, studio assistant, model, muse and, eventually, lover.
At a time when businesses, public institutions and wealthy Americans were commissioning sizable murals, Parrish carried out a number of prestigious such assignments. Several were reproduced in prints.
Parrish carefully and shrewdly used new lithography techniques to enhance sales of his work and earn a very large income. He was constantly asked to create posters, advertisements and decorative touches for various products, but preferred not to do such commercial work except when it was for important clients or a cause he supported.
Around 1920, Parrish took steps that changed the way lithography was used in the Twentieth Century. He stopped using the four-color separations that had been the traditional process since the prior century and challenged lithographers to come closer to the brilliant color, layering and glazing of his paintings by using six to 16 color separations. Samples of proofs in the exhibition illuminate the enhanced process.
Parrish used multilayered lithographs to create much-admired advertisements, becoming known as the “businessman with a brush.” His most popular ads included fairy-tale pictures for the D.M. Ferry Seed Company.
Advertisers recognized that Parrish artwork attracted attention when associated with almost any product. Calendars, which tended to be hung in visible places in homes and offices, were naturals for his eye-catching images. The appealing subjects and high quality of Parrish’s calendars was such that housewives at the end of the year would remove the date pads and frame the prints to decorate their homes.
Paintings that were turned into carefully printed calendar illustrations touting General Electric-Edison Mazda Lamps are among Parrish’s most admired. Standouts include such fantastical images as “Dawn , ” 1918; “Prometheus,” 1920; “The Lamp Seller of Bagdad , ” 1923; “Enchantment,” 1926; “Contentment,” 1928; Ecstasy,” 1930; “Waterfall , ” 1931, and “Sunrise,” 1933.
The Mazda calendars, plus those for Brown and Bigelow, made Parrish a household name. “Enchantment” and “Ecstasy” still grace book covers in popular literature and women’s psychology.
To Parrish, a superb and accurate draftsman, photography was a means to facilitate realistic recordings of hard-to-draw details, such as the folds of drapery on the human figure or forest foliage. A perfectionist, he exercised tight control over the quality and accuracy of his photographs, as well as lithographs. Parrish personally carried out all facets of the process †positioning models or himself in desired poses, constructing models of buildings or landscapes in his workshop and lighting them for dramatic effect. He shot and printed his own negatives.
Parrish never used professional models, preferring to enlist family or friends or neighbors to pose for photographs that were incorporated into paintings. Parrish often posed for male figures himself, as seen in such works as “The Dinkey Bird,” “Old King Cole,” “The Pied Piper” and “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.”
Lewin, his favorite model, had a tomboy look that enabled him to use her for both female and male figures. Her uncanny versatility as a model is reflected in photographs of her posing †and in the resulting images, like “Land of Make-Believe,” “Garden of Allah,” “The Pied Piper,” “The Idiot,” “Rubaiyat” and all 200 figures, male and female, in “Florentine Fete.”
The manner in which Parrish used a photograph, in this case of his young daughter, Jean, followed by a painting, followed by a memorable lithograph is exemplified by the eerily charming “Daybreak,” 1922. The first image he created as part of a reproduction and distribution arrangement with the House of Art †now the New York Graphic Society †to turn his canvases into high quality prints, it was an immediate success.
In 1931, tired of the “commercial game,” Parrish declared that he was “done with the girls-on-the rocks” images and began to paint his favorite subject, landscapes. As the nation labored through the Great Depression and World War II loomed, Parrish’s tranquil, jewel-like landscapes, often inspired by the area around his place in rural New England, conveyed the artist’s love of nature. For a nearly three-decade period, Parrish’s landscapes were reproduced annually on widely distributed Brown and Bigelow Publishing Company calendars and greeting cards. In all, 17 million calendars, three million greeting cards and one million prints were distributed. Parrish received royalties for each one.
Holding true to his commitment to representational art during the dominance of Abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, in 1936 Parrish dismissed abstract art as consisting of “75 percent explanation and 25 percent God knows what!”
Since his death in 1970, appreciation for Parrish’s achievements as both illustrator and easel painter has been reflected in his influence on contemporary artists and popular culture and in well-received museum exhibitions. With greater appreciation for representational art and brilliant technique, there is growing interest not only in his paintings, but in his illustrations for the magazines, books, calendars and advertisements featured in this exhibition.
People increasingly recognize that artists should be judged by the quality of their work, rather than the uses for which it is created. Judged by that standard, Parrish’s art, characterized by brilliant technique, saturated colors, inventive compositions and timeless themes, deserves a higher ranking than has been accorded by the establishment.
Like beloved illustrator Norman Rockwell, who came after him, Parrish had a knack for understanding the nature of his times and the interests of his public. His images continue to resonate with viewers who share his love of dreams, of fantasy, of splendor and of love of place.
After closing in Syracuse, the exhibition travels to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum (July 29⁏ctober 10), and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (October 28⁊anuary 9).
The Everson Museum is at 401 Harrison Street. For information, 315-474-6064 or www.everson.org .
