Maxfield Parrish: The Complete Story
At the peak of Maxfield Parrish's fame, one in four American homes owned a print of Daybreak, a statistic no artwork has approached since. He made blue a brand, painted for calendars, and at 60 announced he was done with girls on rocks.
The most reproduced American painter of the twentieth century spent his last thirty years painting nothing but light on hills, and the art world took fifty years to say thank you.
Maxfield Parrish at a glance:
1870: born in Philadelphia to a Quaker engraver who encourages the drawing habit early.
1895: a Harper's Bazar cover launches a golden-age illustration career almost overnight.
1922: Daybreak becomes the print of the century, hanging, by one estimate, in one American home out of four.
1931: announces he is done with girls on rocks, and paints pure landscape for his remaining three decades.
1966: dies at 95 at The Oaks, his hand-built house in Cornish, New Hampshire.
A Quaker engraver's son
Frederick Parrish was born in Philadelphia on July 25, 1870, son of the etcher Stephen Parrish, and took Maxfield from a family name. Trained at Haverford and the Pennsylvania Academy, he entered the golden age of American illustration just as color printing exploded, and by the 1900s his covers for Collier's and Life, and his illustrated Arabian Nights, were everywhere American eyes landed.
Parrish blue, built like an old master
His saturated cobalt skies, soon simply called Parrish blue, were not paint straight from a tube but stacked transparent glazes over white ground, varnish between layers, the technique of the Flemish masters applied to magazine art. He composed from photographs and paper cutouts with an engineer's patience, and the luminosity still defeats reproduction, which is ironic for the most reproduced painter of his era.
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Daybreak, 1922: one in four homes
Painted for the print market in 1922, Daybreak, two figures under columns in impossible morning light, sold an estimated 200,000 copies in its first years, and surveys concluded that roughly a quarter of American households eventually displayed one.
From 1918 to 1934 his Edison Mazda calendars for General Electric put his light into garages and kitchens by the million. 6 million dollars.
The myth of the kitsch merchant
Serious criticism dismissed him for decades as a calendar confectioner. Two facts complicate the sneer.
In 1931 he walked away from the formula at the height of its earnings, telling the press he was done with girls on rocks, and painted pure landscape for thirty more years at his New Hampshire farm, The Oaks.
And the psychedelic sixties, then photorealists, then museum curators rediscovered that nobody, before or since, engineered light quite that way.
Cornish, and where to see him
Parrish lived and worked at The Oaks in Plainfield, New Hampshire, part of the Cornish art colony, until his death on March 30, 1966, at 95. The National Museum of American Illustration in Newport holds a major collection, Daybreak resides in private hands between headline auctions, and his prints remain the easiest great American art to own.
The machinist of make-believe
The dreamlike pictures were engineered: photographed models, projected tracings, cardboard maquettes of castles, and compositions plotted with dynamic-symmetry geometry.
At The Oaks the machine shop sat beside the studio, and he was often prouder of the lathe work than the varnish.
The glazing, layer over layer with varnish between, was itself industrial in its patience: color built the way a lens is ground.
The models of Cornish
Cornish held an art colony gathered around Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Parrish became its most famous resident.
Susan Lewin arrived as household help at 16 and stayed over five decades: the model for dozens of pictures and the keeper of the house, a bond biographers still handle with gloves.
She left to marry a childhood sweetheart in 1960, at 71. The pictures had long since said whatever the household never did.
Done with girls on rocks
The 1931 declaration was policy: from then on, landscape only, hills and oaks and winter streams.
Brown and Bigelow printed a new Parrish landscape on calendars every year until 1962, when he was 91.
The late pictures drop the figures and keep the light, and collectors who sneered at the calendars now hunt exactly those paintings.
The Maxfield Parrish questions that keep coming up
What is Daybreak? His 1922 painting made expressly for the print market, which became the best selling art print of the twentieth century, displayed in roughly one in four American homes.
What is Parrish blue? The intense cobalt he achieved with layered transparent glazes over a white ground, varnished between coats like an old master panel.
Was Parrish an artist or an illustrator? Both, and he refused the border: magazine covers and calendars paid for a technique as rigorous as any academy painting, and museums now treat him accordingly.
How much is a Parrish worth? Daybreak sold for 7.6 million dollars in 2006, the record for American illustration, and major oils bring seven figures.
Did other artists rate him? Norman Rockwell idolized him, and the Pop generation took him up again seriously; a Parrish hung in Andy Warhol's collection.
What was The Oaks? His self-designed house and studio in Cornish, grown from a hilltop cottage into twenty rooms. The main house burned in 1979; the studio wing survives.
More secrets to unlock
A new Parrish every January
General Electric printed his calendar paintings in editions of over a million copies a year through the 1920s. For a decade, more Americans saw a new Parrish every January than saw any painting in any museum in the country.
