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Maxfield Parrish, A Mechanic Who Painted Fantastically

The landscape of Vermont and New Hampshire inspired Maxfield Parrish in 1922 to create the lush, romantic painting Daybreak.

Daybreak became the most popular art print of the 20^th century. One in four U.S. households owned a print of the neoclassical landscape with two beautiful nymphs in the foreground.

Daybreak, by Maxfield Parrish

Parrish’s spectacularly imaginative art made him famous and allowed him to live comfortably with his family in the Cornish Art Colony. There he entertained President Woodrow Wilson, actress Ethel Barrymore and journalist Walter Lippman. Norman Rockwell idolized him from across the Connecticut River in Vermont. Calendars he illustrated as advertisements sold by the millions. And a shade of cobalt blue was even named after him.

Maxfield Parrish

Maxfield Parrish didn’t understand his own popularity — or at least claimed not to.

“I am hopelessly commonplace, I don’t know what people see in me!” he once said.

His methodical, almost mechanical, way of painting produced brilliant effects of color and light. He adapted the new process printing technique to methods used by the old masters. He started with a monochrome underpainting and then layered on transparent glazes. And between each layer, he applied varnish.

“This method is very simple, very ancient, very laborious, and by no means original with me,” he said. He called himself ‘a mechanic who paints.’

Maxfield Parrish

Ecstasy

Maxfield Parrish was born July 25, 1870, in Philadelphia, to artist Stephen Parrish and Elizabeth Bancroft Parrish. His parents named him Frederick, but he later adopted his maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

From childhood he wanted to be an artist, and his parents encouraged him. When he turned 10, his father took him on a tour of European art museums. They sketched together in Europe and in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Philadelphia.

After graduating from the Pennsylvania College of Arts, he and his father shared a studio in the Annisquam village of Gloucester, Mass.

He studied art for another year at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry, then embarked on a wildly successful career.

Golden Age

During the Golden Age of American illustration, artists produced a prodigious amount of fresh, exciting pictures for books and magazines. There was little difference between commercial and fine art during the period, roughly lasting from 1880-1920. It was triggered by innovations in mass color printing and led by such Brandywine artists as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth.

Successful illustrators achieved celebrity in their day, their names household words.

Maxfield Parrish belonged to that group. He illustrated greeting cards, advertisements and children’s books, including Arabian Nights and Poems of Childhood. His work arrived in the mailboxes of millions of homes, appearing on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, Colliers and Scribners Magazine. His paintings for full-color calendars for Edison-Mazda Lamps sold in the hundreds of thousands, sometimes the millions. People often framed them at the end of the year.

By 1910, he was so successful he was earning more than $100,000 a year in a time when a home could be bought for $2,000.

Cornish

Maxfield Parrish as a young man.

Maxfield Parrish was only 28 in 1898 when he and his new wife, Lydia Austin, could afford to build a house in Plainfield, N.H.

Plainfield belonged to the Cornish Art Colony, and his father .had already moved there. He urged the young couple to join him. Maxfield Parrish built a house across the river from his father and called it The Oaks. He lived there until his death on March 30, 1966.

The Cornish Art Colony flourished from 1895 to about 1925. Led by August Saint-Gaudens, it included artists, sculptors, writers, politicians and entertainers. They lived in the towns of Plainfield and Cornish in New Hampshire, and across the Connecticut River in Windsor, Vt. Residents included President Woodrow Wilson, artist Frederic Remington, dancer Isadora Duncan, actress Marie Dressler, sculptor Daniel Chester French and literary editor Maxwell Perkins.

The Lantern Bearers, 1908

In 1922 Maxfield Parrish finished what he called ‘the great painting’: Daybreak. He used three models: Kitty Owen, William Jennings Bryan’s granddaughter; his daughter Jean; and Susan Lewin, his young nanny.

The painting achieved staggering success. Still in print, Daybreak outsold Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

Parrish eventually moved out of The Oaks and into the studio with Susan Lewin. His wife began to take long trips with their four children. The arrangement scandalized Plainfield, but Parrish and Lewin claimed to have only a Platonic friendship.

Meanwhile the public demanded more images of lissome nymphs and androgynous youths in sumptuous landscapes and fantastical scenes. And so Maxfield Parrish obligingly churned them out.

No More Girls on Rocks

In 1931, Maxfield Parrish told The Associated Press, “I’m done with girls on rocks.” He abandoned illustration for landscape painting, which was more satisfying, but less lucrative.

He hadn’t finished with Susan Lewin, though. Their arrangement continued for 55 years until Lydia Parrish died in 1960. Maxfield Parrish was 90, Susan Lewin was 71, and they could finally marry. He declined, and she left him to marry someone else.

The Mill Pond

Parrish continued to paint landscapes and murals until his death. His clients included the Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Astors, Du Ponts and Hearsts. In 2006, actor Mel Gibson’s wife Robyn bought Daybreak at Christie’s for $7.6 million.

The ‘mechanic who paints’ had an abiding love for machinery. He built a shop beneath his studio and filled it with machines. With them, he created model scenes, props and lighting effects for his paintings. One of his sons, Stephen, became an airline mechanic. Another son, Maxfield Parrish, Jr., helped create the self-developing camera at Edwin Land’s Polaroid Corporation. Daughter Jean became an artist.

Daybreak continues to influence popular culture. Variations were used on a Moody Blues’ album cover, in a Michael Jackson music video, a Bloom County cartoon collection and the movie poster for The Princess Bride.

Parrish around 1920.

A Maxfield Parrish enthusiast bought The Oaks. He then rebuilt it after it burned. It was put up for sale in its entirety for $1.15 million in 2017.

You can visit the center of the Cornish Art Colony, St. Gaudens National Historic Site, a National Park Service site.

This story about Maxfield Parrish was updated in 2022.

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The Mysterious 1644 Portrait of Roger Williams

A portrait of Roger Williams is easy to sketch in words: Baptist minister banished from Massachusetts, founding father of Rhode Island and champion of religious freedom. His achievements are literally woven into the fabric of early America.

The 1644 portrait of Roger Williams

Williams accumulated many admirers for his relations with native Americans, his views on religious freedom and his political leadership, which helped to create Rhode Island. But establishing a memorial for Williams proved difficult because once he died in 1683, there were no likenesses of him. For there was no portrait of Roger Williams – at least that’s what people thought.

He had come to America as a rabble-rousing, English minister who decried corruption in the Church of England. He soon rubbed the residents of Massachusetts the wrong way and was banished to Rhode Island where he studied the language of the local Indians and purchased land from them.

In 1644 he returned briefly to England to win a charter for the Providence Plantations and managed to again infuriate conservative English politicians by publishing a pamphlet calling for religious toleration and separation of church and state.

Back in Rhode Island, Williams turned his efforts to building a baptist church in America and stabilizing Rhode Island. Following his death in 1683, Williams’ house sank into ruin and his grave was lost track of.

More than 100 years later, Williams reputation underwent a revival and his writings and philosophy gained renewed respect as people began appreciating his impact. But connections to Williams, beyond his writings, were few. Images of Williams were created, but their authenticity was never established.

In 1844, Daniel Jones published an article about Williams in a Welsh-language journal, and along with it he published a print he said was a likeness of Williams. Thus a legend was born: While in England in 1644 Roger Williams had had a portrait painted of himself. Following the turmoil of the English Revolution, the portrait had made its way to America, along with other belongings of the Duke of York, and been auctioned in New York.

Daniel Jones had purchased the painting, or so he believed. As Rhode Islanders sought to create a proper memorial for Williams, a letter was sent to the Providence Journal offering to give the painting along with a donation of $500 to any group that would also put up $500 to create a memorial to Roger Williams.

Jones motive was probably not to deceive. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Roger Williams’ beliefs, most likely because he believed Williams had a Welsh heritage like his own. Though his claims about the portrait were invariably questioned, it made it into a number of books about Roger Williams.

Whatever the reason, Rhode Island historian Sidney Rider undertook an inquiry to examine the facts. Could the portrait be real?

Eventually, Rider and others concluded the painting was not authentic. The portrait undoubtedly celebrated Williams’ life; it showed him seated with the Rhode Island charter and had his books in the background. But a number of problems with the painting – including misspelling in one of the titles of his books – led them to conclude the painting was not authentic.

The painting was perhaps, some conjectured, a poor portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been augmented with the background designed to make it look like a painting of Roger Williams.

Nevertheless, reprints of the painting made their way into numerous books about Roger Williams’ life and achievements. Sculptors have also made likenesses of Williams in numerous locations, including Salem, Mass. and in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. But to the best of anyone’s knowledge his features were never documented.

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Lincoln Memorial: A New England Prodigy’s Masterpiece

The Lincoln Memorial was the work of a New Englander with connections to the right people. That’s not to say Daniel Chester French wasn’t a great sculptor–or that his powerful and sensitive Lincoln Memorial isn’t one of the greatest sculptures in America. But it is fitting for Washington’s most beloved monument to owe its existence to a skillful networker.

Daniel Chester French, 1902.

Daniel Chester French was born in 1850 in Exeter, N.H., the scion of an old and well-to-do New England family. His father, Henry Flagg French, a lawyer, served as a judge and, later, assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary. He also pursued horticulture, wrote a book about farm drainage and served as the first president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now University of Massachusetts) at Amherst.

In 1867, Henry Flagg French moved his family to Concord, Mass., where he befriended two neighbors: philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson and writer Louisa May Alcott. Young Daniel didn’t care for school, preferring to explore the outdoors with his good friend William Brewster, later a famed ornithologist. He liked to make figures of animals from wood, gypsum and even turnips.

Another neighbor, May Alcott, Louisa’s sister, was an artist as well as the model for Amy in Little Women. She encouraged Daniel to keep at it and gave him drawing lessons, modeling clay and sculptor’s tools.

The Minute Man

With the help of family friends such as Alcott and Emerson, French hit on the right career path. He dropped out of MIT after a year, having flunked algebra, chemistry and physics. Then he moved to New York to study with two famous artists, John Quincy Adams Ward and William Rimmer. But he didn’t like city life and returned home to Concord at age 20.

He arrived just in time. A committee had formed to commission a statue of a Minute Man to commemorate the centennial of the Battle of Concord and Lexington. The committee gave French the commission in 1873. But instead of paying him a fee, the committee would reimburse for his studio, tools and materials.

His neighbors supplied him with antique Minute Man clothing and a Colonial musket, powder horn and plow. The statue was instantly popular. It still stands today by the Old North Bridge where 500 militiamen defeated three companies of British troops.

Workers install the Lincoln Statue at the Lincoln Memorial

Friends Help

Helped by his father’s position at the Treasury, French received commissions for works on government buildings over the next 14 years. His career got a jump start in 1893 when he sculpted the giant Statue of the Republic for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He worked on preparations for the Exposition with architect Henry Bacon of McKim, Mead & White, one of the preeminent firms of the day.

French and Bacon formed a lifelong friendship and partnered in a number of artistic endeavors. When French and his wife Mary bought an 80-acre farm in Stockbridge, Bacon who designed a new studio, house and garage. The Frenches also landscaped formal gardens and added a tennis court, calling the estate Chesterwood, after the New Hampshire town where French’s grandparents lived. You can visit Chesterwood today.

Bacon was also chosen to design the neoclassical temple that would contain a large sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. He, in turn, chose Daniel Chester French to sculpt that statue.

The Lincoln Memorial

Construction of the Lincoln Memorial Building had already started when French went to Washington to work out the plans for the sculpture. He and Bacon decided on a height of 19 feet. They also decided Lincoln should sit — otherwise people couldn’t see his face.

Beginning in 1915, French made large plaster models of the statue, using Matthew Brady photos for reference. He also used a life mask of Lincoln by Leonard Volk. He aimed, he said, “to convey the mental and physical strength of the great President and his confidence in his ability to carry the thing through to a successful finish.”

French in his studio

By 1918 it was time to start work on the real thing. French chose renowned marble cutters, the Piccirilli Brothers, to sculpt the statue in their New York studio. For two years, the Piccirilli brothers worked from French’s model to carve 28 blocks of marble quarried from Georgia. French helped out, hammering and chiseling his own touches onto the stone. Finally in December 1920, the blocks of marble were ready to be shipped to Washington to be assembled.

The silent, brooding Lincoln who presides over the banks of the Potomac has perhaps become more than French dared hope: a shrine to the ideal of tolerance and reconciliation. Marian Anderson sang “God Bless America” in front of it in 1939 after the Daughters of the American Revolution forbade her to sing at Constitution Hall because of the color of her skin. Martin Luther King, Jr., chose to deliver his “I Have A Dream” speech there in 1968. It is the place where millions of tourists come every year to connect with a sacred icon of their own history.

Dedication

On Memorial Day in 1922, Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s only surviving son, attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. At 78, he needed help to climb the steps to his place of honor at the base of the statue. William Taft, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and President Warren G. Harding joined him.

Taft, who headed the commission to build the Lincoln Memorial, presented it to President Warren G. Harding, who accepted it on behalf of the American people. Fifty thousand people attended the ceremony.

In 1929, the 79-year-old Daniel Chester French and his daughter Margaret French Cresson visited the memorial. He said to her, “Margaret, I’d like to see what this will look like a thousand years from now.” One can only wonder what he would have thought if he could have seen it just 94 years later.

What’s More…

Some of French’s works around New England include

The statue of General Joseph Hooker in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse
The Concord Minuteman, Concord, Mass.
The St. Paul’s School War Memorial, St. Paul’s School, Concord, N.H.
Commodore George H. Perkins monument at the New Hampshire State House
The Melvin Memorial, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.
The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial, Cambridge, Mass.
Wendell Phillips in the Boston Public Garden
Head of Victory, Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.
The George Robert White Memorial, Boston, Mass.
The John Harvard Monument, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Mass.
The Spirit of Life, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Stockbridge, Mass.
“Public Drinking Fountain” (“Chief Konkapot”),the Town Park Village Green in Lee, Massachusetts.

Lincoln Memorial undergoing cleaning in 1991

This story was updated inn 2022. Thanks to two books for this post, So Fine a Prospect: Historic New England Gardens by Alan Emmet and No Better Hope by Brent Ashabranner.

Image of Lincoln Memorial (color): By Jeff Kubina – Lincoln Memorial, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3497205.

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