Maxfield Parrish - a man for his age - artist

Magazine Antiques, July, 1999 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Maxfield Parrish was one of the best known and most revered artists and illustrators of the early twentieth century. Because he devoted much of his career to creating illustrations for magazine articles and covers, calendars, books, theater sets, consumer product packaging, and advertisements, reproductions of his works hung in households throughout the United States. He was lionized and dismissed by critics in cyclical fashion throughout his lifetime and after his death. Now a large traveling retrospective exhibition of his work has been organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the American Federation of Arts. It opens at the former institution on June 19 and will remain on view there until September 25. The exhibition comprises more than 170 drawings, prints, models, photographs, and ephemera. The curator of the show and the primary author of the excellent publication that accompanies it is Sylvia Yount, the chief curator of the Pennsylvania Academy. Future locations for the show, which is entitled Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966, will be listed in Calendar.

Born Frederick Maxfield Parrish in Philadelphia in 1870, he elected to use his middle name for his entire career. His father, Stephen (1846-1938), was an etcher and landscape painter who encouraged his son to pursue his artistic talent. After three years of study at Haverford College, Maxfield Parrish enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts School in 1891, where for two years he studied under a number of artists including Thomas Anshutz and Robert Vonnoh. He attended classes in illustration taught by Howard Pyle at the nearby Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry.

In 1895, Parrish received his first commission for a magazine cover from Harpers Bazaar. The following year he helped organize a poster exhibition for the Pennsylvania Academy - the first of its kind in the country. It represented a turnaround in the academy's approach to commercial art since the institution had earlier declined Pyle's offer to teach illustration to its students. The posters represented the work of such well-known artists as John Sloan, Kenyon Cox, Pierre Bonnard, Aubrey Beardsley, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

In 1898 Parrish and his wife moved to Plainfield, New Hampshire, where he set about designing their large house, down to the last piece of hardware, without benefit of a single architectural plan. Plainfield is a stone's throw from Cornish, the permanent home of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and a summer art colony comprised of an assortment of artists, writers, editors, actors, musicians, and others with an abiding interest in the arts. At the turn of the century there was a growing interest in murals, of which Parrish painted a considerable number.

By the early 1930s Parrish's success as a commercial artist was assured, and in 1936 he painted his last figural work - a parody of himself as Jack Frost. From then on he devoted himself to landscape painting, primarily of scenes in and around Cornish and the American Southwest.

In his catalogue essay "'Frank Imagination, within a Beautiful Form': The Painting Methods of Maxfield Parrish," Mark F. Bockrath outlines the methodical way Parrish worked. First he photographed the figures in their assigned poses and models of buildings (from simple houses to fanciful fairy castles), projected them onto his support (stretched paper, canvas, and Masonite, among others), and then he traced the outlines. He drew some elements of his pictures, then cut them out, and pasted them to the support. He advocated underpainting and often used different color glazes, which give his paintings the fiery glow that is a hallmark of his style. For his graphic works he often heightened his color palette to compensate for the inevitable muting of colors that occurs in the printing process. Parrish was so meticulous that he fashioned many of his own frames (he disliked gold or white frames around his offs, but he did use gold under a brown stain) for a bronze effect. He even made his own packing crates. Parrish's lavish use of glazes, which tend to yellow and crack over time, has created problems in the conservation of his paintings and murals. Nevertheless, they continue to be entertaining and compelling works that have once again found favor with a wide audience.

The book accompanying the exhibition is being published by the academy and Harry N. Abrams. It may be ordered from the academy's museum shop by telephoning 215-972-2075.