Maxfield Parrish Prints

Discover Maxfield Parrish Landscapes

There are very few artists in the history of the United States who have achieved as much through landscape painting as Maxfield Parrish. The internationally-renowned painter and artist devoted the final thirty years of his life to the beautiful simplicity of nature’s most captivating scenes.

To this day, we can enjoy his rich and vivid use of color saturation and popping composition as it applies to some of the most famous landscape paintings to come out of America in the 20th century. To discover Maxfield Parrish landscapes is to view nature in all its glory. Discover Maxfield Parrish's Famous Paintings.

About Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish was born in 1870 in rural Pennsylvania to a landscape painter father and a homemaking mother. Naturally, his father’s work and the surrounding countryside of his early years had a lasting impact on his sense of imagery and compositional technique. Parrish was quickly lauded as one of the bright upcoming talents of the contemporary art world, graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with his parents’ support and encouragement.

Parrish was commissioned to illustrate several works of children’s literature, which boasts some of his finest accomplishments. He created illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s ‘Mother Goose in Prose’ as well as his own set of images for the classic collection of tales entitled ‘Arabian Nights’. Poetry collections, such as Eugene Field’s ‘Poems of Childhood’, also demonstrate his remarkable creative talent.

After many years of commercial and critical success, Parrish declared he was through with “painting women on rocks” and decided to devote himself to the art of landscape painting. Soon thereafter, Maxfield Parrish landscapes became known as some of the most beautiful and riveting replicas of nature ever produced. It is said that Parrish “revised” some of his earlier work by painting over parts of the tableau in order to obscure the original subjects, leaving only the landscape!

The Maxfield Parrish Style
Parrish is best recognized for his unique interpretation of color and three-dimensionality. He wanted his paintings to have an intense visceral effect on the audience, creating visually-pleasing scenes that often had a fairy-tale or fantastical aura, with human subjects set convincingly amidst a spectacular landscape.

Parrish’s very bright, very saturated, and very intense color tones leap off the canvas to dominate the eye’s attention. He painted his subjects in a realistic manner, creating the uncanny effect that the painting had a life of its own. Instead of merely being flat, his paintings typically had three dimensions, a feat he generally achieved by applying alternate coats of paint and sealing each layer with a varnish. Moreover, the exercise would brighten and liven the colors, rendering Maxfield Parrish landscapes truly breathtaking. The technique led to his world-known distinct style.

Maxfield Parrish was a stickler for details. This meticulous artist would build models of his landscapes (based on his photographs) in order to experiment with the angle of the lighting.

Typical Characteristics
There are no better examples of Maxfield Parrish landscapes than the piece ‘Mill Pond’, which shows a small watermill adjacent to a translucent pond, set against a backdrop of beautiful mountains. Even at first glance, an art enthusiast would immediately recognize the Parrish style.

The colors are extremely bright and aggressive, prominent and contrasting with one another rather than blending into each other.
The artist’s distinct love of deep blue is well exhibited in the remarkable reflection of the sky on the water’s surface
The lighting convincingly suggests either dawn or dusk, and helps add an intense level of dimensionality to the work, with shadows emphasizing mood and adding incredible realism.
The subject is so photographic and detailed that it takes a moment to realize you are looking at a painting and not a natural scene. Even the elements of the landscape far in the distance appear cinematic, as if you could reach out and touch them.

Other Maxfield Parrish landscapes such as ‘Arizona’, ‘Christmas Morning’, ‘Riverbank’, and ‘Deep Snow’ boast the same typical characteristics: vivid details, saturated color palettes, and meticulous attention to lighting.

Parrish landscapes have the ability to take you out of your current place and transport you to a beautifully-rendered natural world. I recommend you explore this artist’s work, and discover for yourself why it is set apart from conventional, vanilla landscape art.

Written by Amanda Barnell
Amanda Barnell is an inspiring artist who provides original content for many newspapers and websites. This article was originally published in Maxfield Parrish Prints.