Maxfield Parrish

Parrish built his own studio, The Oaks, in Plainfield, New Hampshire (then Cornish) in 1898-1900, and worked there for nearly seven decades until his death in 1966. The studio was not a commercial workroom in the Rockwell or Leyendecker sense; it was a purpose-built architectural object, designed and partly constructed by Parrish himself, set into the hillside of a 150-acre property overlooking the Connecticut River valley. The property is the subject of many of his landscape paintings—the specific New England hills, the birch and pine forests, the granite outcroppings, the sky color at dawn and dusk—all of which he painted from direct observation on the property.

The studio day was regular and slow. Parrish worked five to six days a week, roughly 9 AM to 4 PM, with additional time at the drafting table during evenings. The slowness was technical: the glaze-and-varnish method he used required drying time between layers that could extend to weeks. A single finished painting routinely took six months to a year; the mature decorative commissions (the Mask and Wig Club murals at the University of Pennsylvania; the King Cole mural for the Knickerbocker Hotel, 1906; the Florentine Fete panels for the Curtis Publishing Building, 1911-1916) took multiple years each.

Parrish operated on a smaller commercial volume than Leyendecker or Rockwell but at a higher per-piece price point. Through the 1920s he was, by some accounts, the highest-paid illustrator in America—the 1922 Daybreak reproduction alone is estimated to have hung in one of every four American households by 1925. The Cornish studio produced roughly one or two major finished paintings per year during the peak commercial decades and supplementary smaller commercial work (calendars, advertising, book illustration) around them.

The studio itself was unusual. North-lit through a large studio window, meticulously organized, equipped with his own-designed workbenches, glass-topped drawing tables, and a substantial photographic-reference archive. Parrish was an active amateur photographer from the 1890s onward and used the camera systematically—black-and-white photography of costumed models, of the Cornish landscape, of specific architectural and botanical reference, all of which fed the composite-reference method he developed. The archive is now held by the Dartmouth College Library.

Parrish's technical signature is a multi-layer glaze-and-varnish method adapted from his own study of Renaissance and seventeenth-century practice and from the treatises he read systematically—Cennini's Il libro dell'arte, Eastlake's Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847), and the nineteenth-century German treatises on Old Master technique. The method was his private invention in its specific combination, and it produces the distinctive "stained glass" luminosity that no other American illustrator of the period achieved.

The support was typically gessoed Masonite (hardboard) panel rather than canvas. Parrish preferred the rigidity and smoothness of panel because his layering method could not tolerate the flexion and texture of stretched linen. Gessoed boards were prepared in the studio in standard commercial sizes and stockpiled.

The ground was white gesso—specifically an absorbent traditional gesso rather than the modern acrylic ground. On top of the gesso Parrish executed a complete grisaille underpainting in black, white, and neutral grays, resolving the full tonal structure of the painting before any color was applied. The grisaille was allowed to dry fully (often several weeks) before the color stages began.

The color was applied as successive transparent glazes over the monochrome grisaille. Each glaze was pure pigment—Parrish favored a short list: cobalt blue, ultramarine, viridian, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, and a few earth pigments—dissolved in a drying oil and dammar varnish medium, applied thin and transparent over the grisaille, and allowed to dry before the next layer went on. Between color stages Parrish applied a thin layer of dammar picture varnish, isolating each color layer so the glazes did not intermix.

The distinctive "Parrish blue"—the specific saturated cobalt-ultramarine blue that pervades his skies—is a product of this system. The color is not a mixture on the palette; it is a transparent glaze of pure cobalt blue over a carefully calibrated gray underpainting, isolated by dammar varnish from any other layer that might dull its chroma. The system trades speed for luminosity—the painting takes months to build but produces a glow that direct oil painting cannot match.

Parrish mixed his own mediums and kept detailed recipe notebooks. The canonical formula combined stand oil, pure turpentine, and dammar varnish in specific proportions that varied by pigment and layer. He preferred cold-pressed linseed and sun-thickened oils for the top glazes and refused certain pigments (notably the bitumen-based asphaltum browns) because of their known long-term chemical instability.

Parrish's process can be described in seven stages, each of which ran on its own multi-week timeline:

Stage one: the idea and thumbnail sketches. Dozens of small pencil compositions, typically three or four inches on a sheet of tracing paper, worked out figure placement, landscape architecture, and the specific allegorical or narrative register. Parrish was a literary painter—the paintings reference Tennyson, the Arabian Nights, Arthurian romance, classical mythology—and the idea stage involved substantial reading in the source material.

Stage two: photographic reference. Models were posed (often family members, including his wife Lydia Austin Parrish and his long-time model-muse Susan Lewin) in the Cornish studio or in the landscape, wearing draped muslin or classical-style costumes that Parrish himself designed and constructed. Black-and-white photographs captured the pose at multiple angles under specific light conditions. Similar photographic sessions captured the Cornish landscape—the specific hill profile, the specific tree, the specific rock formation—at dawn, dusk, and under changing weather.

Stage three: the compositional cartoon. Photographic reference was combined into a full-size composite drawing on heavy paper, using the human figure from one photograph, the landscape from several others, and the architectural elements from still others. The composite was Parrish's invention—a painting that appears to record a single observed scene is actually built from dozens of separately observed components. He used this method openly and described it as the engineering discipline that freed the painting from the limits of any single observed source.

Stage four: transfer to panel. The composite cartoon was transferred to the prepared gessoed Masonite panel by pouncing or by direct tracing, producing a tight pencil drawing on the white gesso surface.

Stage five: the grisaille underpainting. The full tonal structure of the painting was resolved in black, white, and neutral grays using thin oil paint, typically worked over several weeks. The grisaille was allowed to dry hard before any color was applied—often a full month.

Stage six: the color glazing. Transparent color glazes were applied successively over the grisaille, each pure-pigment glaze isolated from the next by a thin dammar varnish layer. The color stages typically ran six to twelve layers total, with drying time between each, and the total color-glazing phase often took three to six months. The painting was gradually tuned—the blues deepened, the flesh warmed, the atmospheric passages softened—until the luminosity Parrish was after was achieved.

Stage seven: final varnish and delivery. A final dammar picture varnish protected the surface and unified the gloss of the multi-layer build. The painting was allowed to cure for a further period before it shipped to the client. The total production time for a major Parrish commission was typically six months to two years.

The method is the opposite of alla prima. Speed is not a virtue; patience is. The finished surface is a record of dozens of dried layers, and the specific optical effect depends on each layer having fully set before the next went on.

Parrish's reference practice is the most technically engineered among his American contemporaries. He used photography systematically from the 1890s—earlier and more thoroughly than Rockwell, contemporary with but independent of the Brandywine experimenters. The camera was a working tool in his studio from the beginning of his career, and he was fluent in its technical use: exposure, lighting, composition, developing, and print-making were all done in-house at Cornish.

The photographic archive now held by Dartmouth College contains tens of thousands of reference photographs. Models posed in costume, the Cornish landscape in every season and light, plaster casts and architectural elements, fabric studies, cloud studies, botanical detail. Parrish treated the archive as a working reference library and drew from it compositely for every major painting.

The composite method was his specific invention. A finished Parrish painting is never a transcription of a single photograph; it is a synthetic construction from multiple photographic sources, filtered through the grisaille tonal system and the glaze color system. The figure in Daybreak (1922) was posed by Kitty Owen (the granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan); the landscape is the Cornish hills; the architectural elements are classical references composed by Parrish; the specific palette is the product of the multi-layer glaze method, not the photographic source. The painting reads as a unified vision because the composite was engineered to unify it.

He maintained a substantial library of costume, fabric, and classical-reference material. Muslin drapery, sandals, classical-style pottery, and architectural plaster models were kept in the studio as working props. Parrish's wife and Susan Lewin (the housekeeper-turned-model who posed for many of the major commercial paintings between 1906 and 1960) wore the studio costumes repeatedly across dozens of paintings.

Direct landscape observation was the other foundation. The Cornish property itself—its specific topography, its specific trees, its specific light—is in every Parrish landscape. He painted it from photography, from memory, and from direct study at the easel. The hills of Plainfield are the hills of Parrish's imagined Arcadia, recorded first in the camera and then rebuilt in the grisaille-and-glaze system.

Parrish studied at Haverford College (architecture, 1888-1891) and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (1892-1894) under Thomas Anshutz, who had himself trained under Thomas Eakins. The Eakins-Anshutz lineage emphasized rigorous figure construction, anatomical accuracy, and photographic-reference discipline—Eakins had been one of the earliest serious painter-photographers in American art—and the foundation is visible in Parrish's lifelong commitment to photographic reference as a craft tool.

After the Pennsylvania Academy Parrish studied briefly with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute (1894-1895). The Brandywine encounter was short but significant. Pyle's principle of "personal knowledge"—the requirement that the painter physically inhabit the subject—does not map cleanly onto Parrish's allegorical and fantasy subjects, and Parrish eventually diverged from Pyle's narrative-illustration doctrine. But the Pyle insistence on thorough reference, on controlled compositional engineering, and on technical rigor in the materials stayed with him. Parrish mentioned Pyle respectfully throughout his career as a formative teacher.

He did not teach. Parrish ran no studio, trained no students, and maintained no pedagogical following. His influence was entirely through the finished work and through the extraordinary commercial distribution of the reproductions—the House of Art prints of the 1920s put Parrish images in millions of American homes and set a popular visual standard for what beautiful painting was supposed to look like.

His principal artistic inheritors are, accordingly, the later American fantasy illustrators and the poster-and-print tradition that carried forward his specific palette and atmospheric register. The album-cover artists of the 1960s and 1970s (notably the Hipgnosis studio for Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the covers of Yes and Genesis records) drew directly on the Parrish visual vocabulary. The digital-matte-painting and fantasy-illustration industries of the 1980s onward inherited the Parrish composite-reference method without often knowing the source.