THE PAINTED PERFECTION OF MAXFIELD PARRISH

Early on in the Unsung Heroes series I featured American illustrator Maxfield Parrish. But in truth he’s not all that unsung, and in …

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American illustrator and artist Maxfield Parrish was born into a quaker family in 1870 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of the successful artist Stephen Parrish, and although he was actually christened Frederick he later adopted the more exotic-sounding Maxfield, his grandmother’s maiden name. As a child it was obvious he had inherited his father’s genetic predisposition for drawing and painting, and there are some surviving examples from his childhood which clearly reveal an early interest in drawing cartoons. Parrish initially studied architecture at Haverford College between 1888 to 1890, but in 1892 he undertook three years of drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. And although by this time he had already begun working from his father’s studio he enrolled for yet more study at the Drexel Institute with Howard Pyle. While there, Parrish met Lydia Ambler Austin and the couple married in 1895. And it was in that year at the age of 27 that he began creating illustration for magazines, when his work was featured on the cover of the Easter edition of Harper’s Bazaar. This prestigious commission led to several more from Harpers and other magazines such as Scribner’s also began to take an interest in his work. At this point his illustration favoured relatively flat formally constructed humorous images similar to those produced by his contemporary Will Bradley. And it was with this broadly comic graphic approach he established himself, with many commissions for posters, press ads and magazines. And the posters he created in 1897 for Scribner’s and The Century magazine were both predictive of his later favoured neo-classical subjects. 2 years later his illustrated edition of L. Frank Baum’s Mother Goose in Prose was published, and this also revealed a more representational and naturalistic approach. The images were all monochrome and for this project he used a stippled pen technique to achieve shading effects. The book was a popular success, and it served to enhance his growing reputation in publishing. By 1898 Parrish had already become quite wealthy from his commercial work and in that year he moved to Cornish, New Hampshire with his family and built a home and studio surrounded by rural landscapes. Parrish suffered, but only briefly from tuberculosis in 1900. And while recovering he learned how to mix oils and glazes and apply them in layers to create particularly vibrant colours. This and the use of a thin blue underpainting had been popular techniques during the Renaissance, and it wasn’t surprising that his painted work shared many of the qualities of the old masters, especially in their capture of light. In 1900 he created his first cover for Life magazine, and in the same year he had another major success with his illustrations for Kenneth Grahame’s book The Golden Age. The fanciful series of illustrations for this book were a combination of line and tonal shading created with what looks like watercolour, but the poor printing makes it hard to be sure of that. This highly successful collaboration between author and illustrator led in turn to Parrish illustrating another volume of Grahame’s work, Dream Days, in 1902. These illustrations were also printed as tonal monochrome but there are several examples which also exist as full colour, and my best guess is that they were printed monochrome because of the expense of full colour lithography. But In 1903, he travelled to Italy to make sketches and notes for 1904’s Italian Villas and Their Gardens, written by Edith Wharton. And the ultimate series of illustrations eventually produced were printed in full colour using offset lithography, and this allowed what Parrish had learned from the masters of the Renaissance to really make his work distinctive. And from this point onward painted colour dominated his output, eventually to the total exclusion of monochrome. His mastery of his medium was particularly evident in his breathtaking fantasy work for 1904’s Poems of Childhood by Eugene Field, which was also reproduced in full colour, and this commission added yet another major success to his growing list of book publishing credits. In the same year he created his first cover for Collier’s magazine and he produced many more over the coming decade, all of which were as imaginative and lightly comic as they were skilful. And although each was easily spotted as a Parrish painting they also demonstrated visual variety from one cover to the next. Unlike some of his contemporaries Parrish had no aversion to using posed photographs in the production of his images, and he even went so far as to build actual models of buildings and architectural features to inform the work. He also set up a projection system so the various elements could be projected onto the canvas and traced off. This method was particularly useful for the evocation of distortion and draping of patterned materials. And although this may have been considered cheating by his more traditionalist contemporaries, in truth he was only updating what Caravaggio and others had done with camera obscura. One of his favoured life models, and also studio assistant, was Susan Lewin, who at the age of only 16 had originally been hired as a nanny for Parrish’s son. She also became his mistress and when this was discovered a couple of years later his wife left and took their son with her. In 1906 he was commissioned to paint a large mural for the bar of the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York. The subject was Old King Cole, and He was paid 5000 dollars for this picture, which now translates as just over 150000. The hotel closed in 1930 but the picture now resides at the St. Regis Hotel and it’s currently valued at around 10 million. His edition of Tales From the Arabian Nights was published in 1909, and The illustrations for this book provided Parrish with yet another opportunity to use his painted prowess to create a series of exotic and highly plausible fantasy images to fire the readers’ imagination. And because his work made no use of a visible line his style was easily distinguished from that of contemporaries such as Rackham and Dulac. And in the same year he created another mural, the Pied Piper of Hamlyn for the bar of the San Francisco Palace Hotel, and he was paid 6000 dollars this time around. In this lively horizontal composition Parrish painted himself as the playful piper, and there is no trace of the sinister aspects of the original tale. 1910 saw the publication of his series of remarkably detailed and highly evocative colour illustrations for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s collected edition of A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales. And in a demonstration of remarkable productivity and creativity this volume was followed less than a year later by more of a similarly romantic fantasy nature for The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. By now Parrish was at the height of his commercial success and there was considerable evidence of a shrewd understanding of how to generate yet more income from illustrations being licensed for a variety of functions. He continued to be in demand for murals and In 1914 he collaborated with the renowned glass designer Louis Tiffany, to produce an immense mural titled Dream Garden as a glass mosaic for the entrance hall of Curtis Pubishing in Philadelphia. And in 1918 he completed yet another, this time with a medieval romantic theme for the mansion of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. In the years following the end of the Great War he appeared with increasing frequency on the covers of the humour magazine Life. This series of images was more whimsical than strictly humorous, but nevertheless they constituted a diverse and visually engrossing body of images which went some way towards propping up the magazine’s falling circulation at the time. Parrish’s success in books and magazines naturally led to a long line of clients eager to have him produce advertising work, And he obliged with posters and press ads throughout the decade. His most enduring relationship was with Edison-Mazda Lamps, and the dramatic quasi-classical images he created for them are arguably among his best remembered overtly commercial work. But Parrish’s most well-known image is undoubtedly 1923’s Daybreak. This idyllic fantasy image was created specifically to be mass produced as a lithograph to adorn the walls of modest American households. It is now reckoned to be the biggest selling print of the 20th century and many others followed, all of which sold in large numbers throughout the USA. Undoubtedly one of his finest and most comedic projects was an expensively bound and printed book The Knave of Hearts, in 1925. It is now generally and quite rightly considered to be one of the most beautifully illustrated books ever published, and it clearly demonstrated his ability to use both technical skill and aesthetic understanding to make pictures guaranteed to delight the viewer’s eye and imagination. Ironically this would be the last of Parrish’s illustrated work, and from this point on he turned his attention exclusively to painting landscapes. Nevertheless he was more than happy to make yet more money from the paintings when they were inevitably reproduced as mass market prints, calendars and greeting cards. In old age Parrish became increasingly troubled with arthritis and by 1960 he could only get around in a wheelchair. Susan Lewin had stayed with Parrish for the last half century, but she finally left him in 1961 when he was 90 and she was a mere 71 – apparently because he refused to marry her. Maxfield Parrish died in 1966 in Plainfield, New Hampshire, at the age of 95, and following his death there was a marked rise of renewed interest in his work, led in the main by the hippie movement and its broad inclination towards romantic fantasy. And as with Alphonse Mucha his work has continued to be globally popular, and shows no sign of being forgotten. Even so, just like Mucha I’m not sure how happy he’d be to see some of the uses it’s been put to.

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