Maxfield Parrish

Who

American painter and illustrator, born in Philadelphia in 1870 and died in 1966 at Plainfield, New Hampshire, where his house, The Oaks, stood near the Cornish art colony. He made magazine covers, murals, calendars and paintings for reproduction, in a slow technique of thin alternating coats of oil and varnish over a white undercoat.

Why they matter

He was one of the most reproduced American painters of his century. Daybreak, painted in 1922 to be sold as a print, is called by the National Museum of American Illustration the most successful art print of the twentieth century, and some estimates put a copy in one American home in four. He shrewdly kept the copyright in his images and collected royalties on the reproductions. The luminous sky colour of his pictures is still called Parrish blue.

What to buy

Originals are not realistic: the paintings are in museums, public buildings and a few private collections, and Daybreak set his auction record in 2006. He is also still in copyright, so the honest way in is the reproduction he made his living from, bought as it was issued in his lifetime. The House of Art in New York, later the New York Graphic Society, was the exclusive publisher of his fine-art prints, and Daybreak was its first commission; a period Daybreak names The House of Art, so read the label and the print before paying for age. The cheapest genuine Parrish is a calendar: General Electric produced more than 20 million Edison Mazda calendars with his pictures between the late 1910s and the early 1930s. Anything naming a modern publisher is a later reproduction, fine to hang but not a period piece. Book: Coy Ludwig's Maxfield Parrish (Watson-Guptill, 1973), still the classic reference, with a long chapter on his technique.

Notes

In copyright until the end of 2036 in life-plus-70 countries, so no free image archives are linked here. The National Museum of American Illustration holds 69 of his works. Susan Lewin posed for many of his pictures from 1904 and became his long-time assistant. By 1935 he painted only landscapes, having said "I'm done with girls on rocks."

Story

Daybreak was commissioned by The House of Art to be reproduced, and within a few years some estimates put a copy of the print in one American home in four. The painting itself went on show in November 1925 at the Scott and Fowles gallery in New York, one of the few exhibitions Parrish held in his lifetime. The gallery sold every picture on the walls, Daybreak among them, to a buyer nobody later recorded.

One of the models for it was Kitty Owen, the granddaughter of the orator William Jennings Bryan, who had posed for it at eighteen. In 1948, by Gilbert's later account, she bought the painting herself from a Madison Avenue gallery, for less than the mystery buyer had paid in 1925. She kept it for a quarter of a century. In 1974 it passed from her collection, through a gallery that disclosed no provenance, to Alma Gilbert, who later wrote about Parrish; Gilbert only learned in 2003, meeting Owen's family, how the model had come to own the picture. In May 2006 Daybreak sold at Christie's for a record price for a Parrish painting, and it has always stayed in private hands.

Key works

• Old King Cole (1906) - mural, St. Regis Hotel, New York
• The Gardener (1906)
• The Dream Garden (1916) - Tiffany Studios glass mosaic, Curtis Center, Philadelphia
• Daybreak (1922) - private collection

In museum collections

• Dream Castle in the Sky (1908)
  Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗
• The Fisherman and The Genie: from the Arabian Nights (1905)
  Yale University Art Gallery ↗
• Villa Gamberaia, Settignano (1903)
  Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗
• Girl on a Swing (1918)
  The Met ↗
• Hill Top Farm, Winter (1949)
  MFA Boston ↗
• Lady Ursula Kneeling before Pompdebile, King of Heart (1924)
  Yale University Art Gallery ↗
• Scribner's (1897)
  MoMA ↗
• Sinbad Plots against the Giant (1907)
  Philadelphia Museum of Art ↗
• The Errant Pan (1910)
  The Met ↗

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also

Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 18 museums on a map