Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) was an American painter and illustrator, born in Philadelphia, who painted magazine covers, children's books, murals and calendars. His picture Daybreak, from 1922, became the most popular art print of the twentieth century. He is also the man behind Parrish blue, the deep glowing cobalt of his skies.
In the 1920s his girls on rocks hung in American living rooms by the million. The painting behind the most famous of them hung in none.
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Daybreak is a small canvas, about 67 by 114 centimeters. Two young women in loose robes stand and recline among stone columns, above a lake and a ridge of mountains lit by a morning that never happened. A print publisher, House of Art, ordered it in 1920, and Parrish painted it in 1922 to be copied. The prints went on sale in 1923.
The famous figure is that one American household in four owned a copy. Museums repeat it and so do auction houses, and none of them names a count behind it. It is an estimate. What nobody disputes is the scale: from 1920 through the 1950s his prints went out by the millions.
The painting itself stayed out of sight. Daybreak has always belonged to private owners, so the picture on all those walls was a copy of something almost no one could go and see. When it came up at Christie's in 2006, it sold for 7.6 million dollars, the highest price yet paid for a Parrish.
What You'll Discover
Who he was before the blue.
What the blue was really made of.
How a calendar reached millions of walls.
Who really lived in his studio.
Why he quit his own best formula.
Which side of the line he stood.