Domesticated Colors

Along Manhattan's 57th Street strollers last week spotted in the window of the Ferargil Galleries a carefully painted cutout figure of a sandwich man in a pot hat, holding a sign, just as they have done for 40 years, people wondered out loud whether the little man was not a colored photograph. There was only one person who could have painted it. After eleven years, white-haired, handsome Maxfield Parrish was holding an exhibition.

No matter what art critics may think, art dealers know that, as far as the sale of expensive color reproductions is concerned, the three most popular artists in the world are van Gogh, Cezanne and Maxfield Parrish. Daybreak, Parrish's famed picture showing a boy and girl against a rising sun, has sold over 200,000 copies. Parrish Blue is a well recognized name for the vivid electric blue skies that he has affected for nearly two generations.

"He has no imitators," declared Charles Fabens Kelley of the Chicago Art Institute last week, "because it is too darn hard work to imitate him. . . . He can domesticate the most unruly colors."

Born in Philadelphia in 1870. Maxfield Parrish inherited his talent from his father. Etcher Stephen Parrish. Comfortably off, he was sent to Haverford college, later to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. There he began experimenting with that deep luminous color with which he was later to win his popular renown. Not until he went to Paris did he learn the trick from copyists of Flemish and Italian primitives. A Maxfield Parrish sky starts with a wash of thin plaster on a prepared board, followed by a coat of pure ultramarine blue. Successive layers of transparent blue glazes are put on with such finicky care that no brush strokes are ever visible.

Married at 25, Artist Parrish settled in New Hampshire, contracted typhoid fever, had to move to the Adirondacks and finally to Arizona for his health. To intimates he admits that the particular rocky gorges that he has been putting in his imaginary landscapes for years exist in reality 50 miles beyond Phoenix where the desert joins the Bradshaw Mountains.

Advertisers and publishers were soon clamoring for Parrish's work. He did innumerable color pictures for the Ladies' Home Journal and covers for Collier's, illustrated many a children's book. One of the best known barroom murals in the U. S. is his work. At the turn of the century John Jacob Astor commissioned Artist Parrish to paint a picture of Old King Cole for his Hotel Knickerbocker. The panel, 28 feet long, showing the pipe, the bowl, the fiddlers three, was the wonder of Times Square for nearly 20 years. Last autumn it reappeared in the St. Regis King Cole Room. In addition Maxfield Parrish has decorated the Ladies' Home Journal Building in Philadelphia, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's studio on Long Island and the music room at Irenee du Font's huge estate near Wilmington.

An elaborately worked sketch for the last was in the Parrish show last week. All the other pictures were new but painted in the old manner: pink rocks in a blue mist, spinach-green trees in a theatrical amber light, all ticked out in the most minute detail. True to his promise five years ago to paint no more nude girls on rocks, there are no figure studies in the present exhibition.

Maxfield Parrish lives in Cornish, N. H., gets his mail at Windsor, Vt. Carpentry and metal working are his hobbies. In his studio is a complete machine shop where he turns brass andirons, makes his own panels, frames, stretchers.

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