Parrish was born in Philadelphia, the son of old-line Quaker
parents. His father, Stephen (1846-1938), a well-known painter
and etcher, gave him art lessons early on and took his son on
joint painting trips. During family trips to Europe, the budding
artist visited museums and galleries and was particularly
impressed by the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Parrish's iconic "Daybreak," 1922, oil on board, 261/2 by 45
inches, is owned by the curator of the exhibition, Alma Gilbert
Smith. It has been widely reproduced in prints.
Returning home, Parrish attended Haverford College until his
junior year, when he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts. Starting in 1892, he studied under Thomas Anshutz and
Robert Vonnoh. William Glackens was a classmate.
In 1895, Parrish married Lydia Austin, a young art instructor at
the Drexel Institute, where Parrish attended lectures by the
father of American illustration, Howard Pyle. Pyle helped young
Parrish win a commission for a cover of Harper's Bazaar, which
facilitated the marriage of the beautiful instructor and the
handsome young artist.
Kenyon Cox's 1905 portrait of Parrish, from the collection of the
National Academy Museum, captures the 35-year-old artist's Robert
F. Kennedy-like good looks.
Before the turn of the century, Parrish created illustrations for
important books and magazines, enabling the young couple to move
from Philadelphia to Plainfield, N.H., near Parrish's parents'
place. In their home, "The Oaks," sited on a hill overlooking
Mount Ascutney, they raised their family and Parrish pursued his
career. He became a significant figure in the Cornish, N.H., art
colony that gathered around sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and
painter Thomas W. Dewing.
In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, Parrish carried out
an impressive series of commissions for illustrations in books
such as Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens, a poem
by William Lucius Graves and numerous prestigious magazines like
Century, Harper's and Ladies Home Journal.
"Poet's Dream," 1901, presaged numerous romantic images in
idyllic settings that were to follow in his career. Another
flamboyant beauty, used to illustrate The Arabian Nights, is
"Princess Parizade Bringing Home the Singing Tree," 1906, from
the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
"Alphabet," 1909, reflects the young artist's ability to jumble
letters together in a pleasing composition.
Among other notable works from this early period on view in the
exhibition is the haunting "Vigil at Arms," 1904, which shows a
stalwart knight preparing for battle the coming day with an
all-night prayer vigil. The stately columns in the painting were
based on models created by Parrish himself in his elaborate
machine shop.
In perhaps his most important mural commission, Parrish
decorated the walls of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's Long
Island studio with a scene of flirtatious young people
congregating around a huge urn. East Wall, Panel, 1914, oil on
canvas, both 633/4 by 741/4 inches. Private collection.
As these early images suggest, Parrish considered himself
"strictly a popular artist," interested in broad distribution and
appreciation of his work. "Parrish committed himself to the
popularization and democratization of art, viewing beauty as a form
of social improvement," observes Diane Lesko, executive director of
the Telfair Museum of Art, where the exhibition opens on September
28. By the 1920s Parrish was the highest-paid artist in America;
his prints were said to hang in one of every four households.
Although Thomas Eakins had left the Pennsylvania Academy six
years before Parrish arrived there, the younger artist was
influenced by the manner in which the older man used photography
in creating paintings, and followed that example extensively in
his own art. Parrish's "talent allowed him to draw a figure with
the accuracy of a photograph," writes Smith in the exhibition
catalog, "so he insisted on using the camera as a tool, but never
as a crutch for his art."
He took his own pictures and developed his own film, which he
projected on glass slides with a magic lantern against a wall or
board as he composed works. Included in his inventory were
numerous photos of himself, his young daughter, Jean, and Susan
Lewin, a local girl who originally joined the Parrish household
as a 15-year-old, live-in maid.
The exhibition includes numerous photographs of the outgoing,
attractive Lewin in a variety of costumes and poses, such as for
"Land of Make-Believe," circa 1905, and as the male figure for
"Rubaiyat," circa 1916. She carried on a nearly five-decade
intimate relationship with Parrish, augmenting her housekeeping
work by serving as studio helper, model and muse.
During a time when businesses, public institutions and wealthy
Americans commissioned sizable murals, Parrish carried out a
number of prestigious assignments. His first mural, a
5-by-12-foot, humorous, illustrative work based on the Old King
Cole fairy tale, was for the clubhouse of the University of
Pennsylvania's Mask and Wig Club in Philadelphia. It was such a
success that financier John Jacob Astor asked him to create
another version for his Knickerbocker Hotel in New York. For a
fee of $5,000 Parrish completed an 8-by-30-foot extravaganza that
featured Astor as the monarch. It now graces the bar/lounge of
the St Regis Hotel.
The success of Old King Cole encouraged sculptor/art
patron/heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to commission Parrish
to decorate the walls of the reception room of her Long Island
studio with a five-panel mural of an elaborate Renaissance fete.
Between 1914 and 1918 the artist employed a brilliant palette -
Smith calls it "super-rich Technicolor" - in creating this
spectacular work.
Parrish's charming "Jack Frost," which appeared on the cover of
Collier's magazine in 1936, was based on his last figurative
painting. Oil on board, 25 by 19 inches. The Haggin Museum,
Stockton, Calif.
The largest, final segment, the "North Wall Panel," 1918,
measuring approximately 63 by 221 inches, is Parrish's "most
painterly work...[and] the richest in color and detail," according
to Smith. The ensemble of some 60 young people attending a costume
party includes the artist's wife, Lydia, as the central figure, the
hostess greeting guests, surrounded by several males and females
modeled by Lewin.
The Whitney oils on canvas were "certainly...a masterpiece
different from any illustrative mural done thus far," says Smith.
The panels remained in place at the Whitney site until 1998, when
the family asked curator Smith to display them at her Cornish
Colony Gallery & Museum (near the Parrish studio where they
were painted), and allowed them to travel with this show.
Another Parrish fan, Kodak founder George Eastman, and fellow
industrialist George Todd contracted for three murals on a
musical theme for the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, N.Y. The
"Interlude Mural," 1922, shows three classically gowned, young
female lute players lounging in an Edenic setting. "It is
certainly one of the more successful depictions of portraiture in
a Parrish mural," observes Smith, "and because it was also
reproduced and distributed as lithographs... it is one of the
most celebrated." In 2001, the "Interlude Mural" was selected to
represent Parrish's work on a US Postal Service stamp celebrating
great illustrators of the Twentieth Century.
The original 7-by-5-foot painting, for which two of Todd's nieces
are believed to have modeled, has been loaned by the Eastman
School of Music to the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of
Rochester. It is a highlight of the exhibition.
On view for the first time is the recently conserved, original
version of a landscape mural that Parrish painted in 1932-33 to
go over the organ at Granogue, the Irenée du Pont estate in
Delaware's Brandywine Valley. About 20 years later, recognizing
that the panels were in poor condition, the artist took the mural
down and replaced it gratis at Granogue, where it remains in situ
to this day.
In the late 1970s, curator Smith discovered the further
deteriorated original when she purchased Parrish's old property.
After a long, laborious process, the "Du Pont Mural" was restored
by a team of students guided by master conservator Joyce Hill
Stoner of the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art
Conservation. Stoner's crew devoted 940 man-hours to consolidate
and 350 man-hours to inpaint each panel. The result is that the
previously unrecognizable mural has been restored to its initial,
brilliantly hued magnificence.
Parrish made careful, shrewd use of new lithography techniques to
enhance sales of his work in that medium and earn a very large
income. He was constantly asked to do commercial work such as
posters, advertisements and decorative touches for various
products, but preferred not to do them unless they were for
important clients or a cause he supported.
