Maxfield Parrish: 180+ Paintings and Illustrations - Gallery Series

MAXFIELD PARRISH Art Book contains 180+ HD Paintings and Illustrations from the following books; Dream Days, A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, The Knave of Hearts, The Arabian Nights, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, Poems of Childhood, and The Reluctant Dragon. Magazine illustrations; Collier's and Harper's Weekly, Scribners, Life, and more. Full color posters, advertisements and Parrish's masterpiece paintings with gallery page, museum links and biography.

The American republic was less than a century old when Frederick Maxfield Parrish was born in the city of its genesis. But during the so-called Gilded Age in which young Parrish would make his mark, America thrust itself forward into an era of breathtaking change. While Twain’s sneering moniker for the late-nineteenth century expressed a dichotomy between glittering surfaces and shabby realities, there was a more interesting juxtaposition occurring in American culture that Maxfield Parrish embraced and reconciled with seemingly effortless excellence and charm.
In his legendary autobiography, Henry Adams described the year of Parrish’s birth, 1870, as “the close of the literary epoch, when quarterlies gave way to monthlies; letter-press to illustration; volumes to pages.” Six years later in Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition, the telephone, typewriter, and electric light were introduced to the world. But even as technology and commerce inaugurated an age of dizzying light and noise, Americans also instinctively reached back, eager to hold on to a “vision splendid” of bygone simplicity and authentic beauty. Parrish’s work reveled in that sensibility while serving new economic and material realities.
At the heart of this combination was America’s new mass-market for magazines which, as historian Matthew Schneirov describes, “sought to elevate middle-class tastes through exposure to great literature and art.” From 1895 onwards, Parrish received numerous commissions from the likes of Scribner’s, Collier’s, Harper’s, and Century to produce lush illustrations for articles and covers. It was an auspicious time to be an illustrator, as technological advances increased the quality and quantity of pictures in publications, while a massive surge in advertising funded the cultural reach of these magazines (cont).