Maxfield Parrish: Machinist, Artisan, Artist

by Carrie Brown, American Precision Museum, Frank Lather (Photographer)

In 1923, The Boston Globe announced to a surprised American public that the country's most beloved painter was also a mechanic. Maxfield Parrish, "the painter of those brilliant landscape-s creator of the atmospheric fantasy of fairyland," had a work shop that would be the envy of many a machinist, and claimed to be not an artist who loved machinery, but a machinist who painted pictures. Parrish's audience, of course, knew him only as a painter and illustrator. At the very beginning of his career, in the eighteen-nineties, new printing processes had just made mass-produced color illustration practical. By that time, also, the American people had achieved a standard of literacy and a thirst for culture that created a vast market for books and magazines In the early years of the twentieth century, Maxfield Parrish illustrations graced the covers of magazines such as Life and Collier's, decorated lavishly-produced children's books, hung over millions of mantles, and advertised products ranging from Jell-O to Fisk Tires. While he was certainly the most popular working artist in America, Parrish also received recognition from art critics and collectors. All the while, he continued to spend his afternoons in the machine shop The exhibition “Maxfield Machinist, Artisan, Artist” offers a glimpse into Parrish's painting studio and his machine shop, and explores the connections between the two. Different forms of creativity often require the same both art work and machine work require an ability to conceive a design and then carry it out with precision. For Parrish there were more direct connections as well, when items created in the shop appeared in the paintings. Even as he painted, he employed a highly technical method. Together, artistry and technology created "the atmospheric fantasy of fairyland" in the work of Maxfield Parrish. (This Kindle edition is a reprint of an APM Exhibit Catalog, originally published 1995.)

46 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 24, 2020

About the author

Carrie Brown is the author of five novels – her most recent novel is The Rope Walk (Pantheon, 2007) – and a collection of short stories, The House on Belle Isle. Her other novels include Rose’s Garden, Lamb in Love, The Hatbox Baby and Confinement.

She has won many awards for her work, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and The Great Lakes Book Award. She has also twice won the Library of Virginia’s Fiction Award, and her novel The Rope Walk was chosen as the All Iowa Reads Selection by the Iowa Public Library. Her novels have appeared on the Best Books of the Year lists from The Christian Science Monitor and The Chicago Tribune.

A frequent book reviewer for newspapers including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, her short fiction has also appeared in journals including One Story, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, and Blackbird. She teaches Creative Writing at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. You can visit her summer reading blog http://bookclub.blog.sbc.edu/.