(Kenyon Cox, Maxfield Parrish. 1910. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25". National Academy Museum, New York.)
In 2005, my husband and I drove south to see a touring exhibition of Parrish's work at the San Diego Museum of Art. Having the opportunity to see his panels and posters in all their luminescent glory made quite an impression on both of us. I wanted to linger for hours because I didn't know if or when I would have another opportunity of seeing a good number of his important works in one place.
Parrish's method was in the style of the old masters of the Northern Renaissance, carefully preparing his supports, then executing an underpainting with cobalt blue (which was marketed for a time as "Parrish Blue" by the Winsor & Newton paint company), adding his color with his paints straight from the tubes mixed with an oil creating glazes. Each of these layers of glazes was separated by a layer of varnish with days of drying in between. A microscopic cross-section analysis of some of his works in the late 1990s showed that he used as many as 50 layers of glazes and varnish. It was this intensive labor that made his works glow in a way that could not be reproduced in coffee table monographs.
(Reservoir at Villa Falconieri, Frascati. 1903. Oil on paper, 28 x 18". Illustration for Italian Villas and their Gardens, Edith Wharton, 1904. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.)
Scholars believe that Parrish was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, especially Frederic Leighton. A teenage Parrish is thought to have met Dante Gabriel Rossetti during a trip to England with his parents. As an art student in Philadelphia, he attended lectures by Jay Hambidge on the principal of dynamic symmetry (sometimes referred to as the Golden Mean or Beautiful Proportion), which as Hambidge believed, was the system used by the Egyptians and Greeks to create pleasing proportions in architecture as well as vase paintings. Below is a small version of Parrish's most famous painting Daybreak (1922), overlaid with an imitation of composition lines that Parrish referred to as his "whirling triangles" superimposed over the image.
(Daybreak. 1922. Oil on panel, 26x45". Private collection.)
In a nutshell, the idea is that proportions should be balanced on either side of the intersection at the center of the composition and that elements of the composition should echo some of the diagonal lines. The superimposed lines above are very simplified versions of the lines that Parrish used to map out his works. A half-scale watercolor study of Daybreak survives with not only Parrish's diagonals as well as squares and rectangles, but the figures outlined in graphite in different sizes and a third figure seated next to the column on the right.
The finished painting was a hit with the public. Parrish was the first artist to bring contemporary Fine Art to the masses. A company called House of Art reproduced Daybreak in lithographs, and Parrish earned $25,000 in royalties the first year with numbers of copies sold in the thousands.
Thanks to the influence of his instructors at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, Parrish utilized all the latest technologies that were available to artists at the time. Most lithographs were created with six color separations. Parrish and House of Art developed a new technique to produce posters with 17 color separations, giving the reproductions a sharpness and clarity of color unseen before that time in the mass market. Parrish often layered his glazes in the order he knew they would later be printed in, thus ensuring the reproductions were true to the oil originals.
Parrish also used cameras as a time-saver, photographing his models in the pose he wanted for the finished painting; he developed glass slides in his own dark room, and then using a magic lantern he would play with the arrangement and size of the figures until he was satisfied with the composition. Considering his painstakingly slow method of using so many layers of glazes, it would have been impossible for any model to pose for the number of months it took for a piece to be finished.
What I also found interesting about Parrish's method is that he would work from the background of an image up, finishing the landscape background fully from side to side on the support before adding architectural elements, plants, objects, and finally the figures in separate layers. This method might be considered a 2-D precursor of the Multiplane Camera invented in the 1930s at the Walt Disney Studios in order to give animated films more depth. A full width background was layered with several glass plates of more background elements and the final cell of the moving figure was on top of up to five layers about six feet deep with the camera rigged from above at a perpendicular angle. The effect was best displayed in the opening sequence of Pinnochio in 1940.
(Walt Disney with a cross-section blueprint of the Multiplane Camera, ca. 1964. © The Walt Disney Studios.)
Critics and scholars have called Parrish's mature works photorealistic; those works also had a sense of hyper-reality. His early book illustrations were stylized whimsy; those of the Wharton book were veristic, but eventually Parrish improved nature. He would take disparate elements of the Connecticut Valley surrounding his homestead, The Oaks, and rearrange them to suit his paintings, often building scale models to lay out the ideal landscape he imagined. This was similar to the methods employed by Nicolas Poussin, the French painter considered the father of Neoclassicism. Poussin was known to rearrange stands of trees as well as the placement of hills and temples in his landscapes, creating a perfected version of reality. Combining flawless landscape with fairy tale figures, precision composition and brilliant color, Parrish was often named the most popular American artist from the late 1890s until the 1930s.
(Land of Make-Believe. 1905. Oil on canvas laid down on board, 40 x 32". Private collection.)
Land of Make-Believe marked the first appearance of Susan Lewin as a model in a Parrish work. Parrish did not like professional models, as he felt they had lost their innocence of attitude, and so he used himself as well as friends, family, and employees, paying children a quarter to pose for his camera. Parrish had used his wife Lydia as his model in many of his early professional commissions. In 1904, Lydia gave birth to the first of their four children, the last being born in 1911. Sue came to work at The Oaks as an au pair; her aunt was a maid in the household of Parrish's artist father Stephen and the elder Parrish recommended the 15-year-old to his son.
Although Sue started out helping with the children, Dilwyn, Maxfield Jr., Stephen, and Jean, she soon began cooking and serving Parrish his lunch and tea in the studio, 40 feet away from the main house on the property. Eventually, she also became his gatekeeper, deciding who would be admitted and ensuring he was not bothered during his work hours of 6:00 a.m. until lunch, and then again until tea was served at 4:00.
At some point Sue usurped Lydia's place in Parrish's affections and the two of them permanently moved into the 15-room studio in 1911. From 1905 until 1935, she was often the main adult female figure in many of his paintings, although Kitty Owens, granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan, is the face of the model of Sue's reclining figure in Daybreak. His unwritten love letter to Sue could be considered Florentine Fête, a series of 18 large panels created for the ladies dining room of the Curtis Building in New York. Curtis published Ladies Home Journal, and the magazine printed images from several of the panels in various issues calling the space "the most beautiful dining room in America." It took Parrish from 1911 to 1916 to execute all the panels, and while Parrish himself could be seen as a couple of the figures, along with his cousin Anne as another, it was Sue's face in nearly every other figure. An interesting aside is that because of the sheer number of figures required to fill out the imaginary scene, Parrish reused many figures from earlier works including Griselda and The Lantern Bearers. The dining room became a great tourist attraction while Parrish's fame was at it's peak.
Parrish and Lydia both descended from old Pennsylvania Quaker families; Parrish's great-great-grandfather Issac being George Washington's personal haberdasher in Philadelphia, and his great-grandfather Joseph, a doctor, was credited with saving countless lives during typhus outbreaks in the early 19th century. Parrish Street in Philadelphia was named in honor of the family in the early 1800s.
About 1898, Parrish's mother left Stephen to live in a commune in Pasadena, creating great outrage; as a result, he was very sensitive to any whiff of scandal in his arrangement with Sue. Parrish was extremely concerned with not only what the neighbors might think, but also well-paying clients. He did not want to jeopardize potential commissions with any hint of moral impropriety at a time when divorce rarely occurred. Unlike other illustrator artists of his day, Parrish was able to charge four figures and get it for a single commission. Considering that part of his fame had been built upon his whimsical illustrations for childrens books, he had a great deal to lose if the public were to learn the truth. The relationship between Parrish and Sue was denied over decades, and even the Parrish children while young, were unaware of the true nature of their father's relationship with "Aunt Sue." Sue posed as the Lady Violetta, and his daughter Jean the Knave, in the childrens book The Knave of Hearts (Louise Saunders, 1925. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
When Lydia died in 1953, Sue lived with Parrish another seven years before realizing he would never legitimize their partnership. She had worn a wedding ring from the time that she moved into the studio and sometimes confessed her love for Parrish to her own family members. In 1960, she left The Oaks then married Earl Colby, a sweetheart of her youth, as if to prove to Parrish that she was still attractive at the age of 70. Not long afterward, Parrish declared that his arthritis flared up to the point that he could no longer use his right hand. In any case, his last painting was called Getting Away From It All, a landscape featuring a snowbound cabin flanked by an oak tree, with a single light burning in one window. Romantics claimed that he lost his will to paint after Sue's marriage.
The Florentine Fête panels have been restored and are now on view at the National Museum of American Illustration (http://www.americanillustration.org) in Newport, Rhode Island, along with a selection of other works by Parrish. Some critics have used the word "cold" to describe Parrish's many depictions of his mistress. Whether one sees the actual painted panels or reproductions in books, there admittedly is a reserve, a distance between the viewer and the subject. If his works were meant to immortalize her image, or demonstrate the depth of his regard for Sue, it seems Parrish could never bring himself to lower his guard against scandal, and had to continue the illusion that she was nothing more than his household servant.
Despite his clandestine manner of living the bohemian life that his Pre-Raphaelite idols led, Parrish was very much a product of his Victorian era, New England Quaker upbringing. Lydia never divorced him, but unable to keep up the pretense of normality under intolerable circumstances for even the most forgiving of wives, she eventually moved to live on one of the Georgia Sea Islands, producing one of the first ethnographic studies on the songs of former slaves. In contrast to the educated Lydia, who taught at the Drexel Institute before marrying Parrish, Sue was a drop out, a "country bumpkin." No one really knew the true depth of the relationship; Sue died early in 1978 still denying to all but family that she had been more than a loyal retainer to the end. If Parrish did truly love her, but couldn't bring himself to marry her when he was free to do so, because it would expose the lies of the prior 58 years, one has to wonder about the final six years of his life. His children had all married and moved away from the Plainfield, New Hampshire homestead. At the end, he had a live-in nurse when he died shortly after midnight on March 30, 1966.
With the reappraisal of Parrish's work since the 1960s, he is now appreciated by new generations. Michael Jackson, with then-wife Lisa Marie Presley, appropriated the iconic image of Daybreak for the music video, You Are Not Alone. Parrish's work has also been referenced by other artists and directors in subtle ways.
One of my favorites is Stars, featuring his daughter Jean as the model. Disney appropriated the silhouette for an early promotional poster before the release of The Little Mermaid. The central figure was used by The Moody Blues in promotional artwork for their 2001 world tour. The Moody Blues also used a solarized rendering of Daybreak for their disc The Present. If you keep your eyes open, Parrish's images live on. Maybe we find them so endearing because of the fairy tale worlds he opens to us, timeless places that seem to be beyond perfect yet so real. They capture our attention and never leave us.
The fact that Clement Greenberg ignored when making his pronouncements on art and kitsch was that Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael were the commercial artists of their own day. Their works were not art for art's sake, a 19th century concept, but projects contracted by patrons for a fee - never something made for pleasure or on spec. Using the technology that was available to him in his time, as well as precision methods of painting in oils handed down since the 15th century, Maxfield Parrish used his imagination to create dreamscapes of wonder that many of us would love to live in. Long live the Art of Maxfield Parrish.
(Stars. 1926. Oil on panel, 35¾ x 22¼". Private collection.)
(The Little Mermaid. 1989. ©The Walt Disney Company.)
(Moody Blues Hall of Fame Tour poster. 2001. McCrae and Bob Masse)
(The Moody Blues, The Present CD. 1986. Graphic artist unknown.)
(Maxfield Parrish, ca. 1920. Photographer unknown.)
I do not own these images, nor intend to make money from the above images with the posting of this blog. All images belong to their copyright owners. No copyright infringement is intended.
Maxfield Parrish resources:
The Parrish House Museum: http://www.parrishhousemuseum.org
Maxfield Parrish Online: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/parrish_maxfield.html
Yount, Sylvia. Maxfield Parrish: 1870-1966. 1999. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Cutler, Lawrence S., Cutler, Judy Goffman and the National Museum of American Illustration. Maxfield Parrish and the American Imagists. 2004. Edison, N.J.: The Wellfleet Press.
Gilbert, Alma. The Make-Believe World of Maxfield Parrish and Sue Lewin. 1997. Berkeley, CA: Ten-Speed Press.
Nice post. Where did you hear that Sue Lewin's "aunt" worked for Stephen Parrish as a maid? I haven't seen that written anywhere.
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