Born Frederick, Parrish took the name of paternal grandparents, Maxfield, early in his life, although his family and friends continued to call him by his surname, Fred. He no doubt received early artistic encouragement and training from his father, the etcher and painter, Stephen Parrish. During a family trip to England and France from 1882 to 1885, Parrish worked at Dr. Kornemann's school in Paris. After studying architecture at Haverford College from 1888 to 1891, Parris spent two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, under Thomas Anshutz and Robert Vonnoh. He also worked briefly at the Drexel Institute with Howard Pyle, although his illustrative style was already developed by this time.
Parrish began his extraordinarily sucessful career as a illustrator with his cover for Harper's Weekly in 1895, the first of numerous covers for magazines including Life and Collier's. Parrish's reputation as a book illustrator was also established with his first publication, designs for Frank Baum's Mother Goose, in 1897, two years after his first mural decoration. Parrish went on to design murals, advertisements, theater sets, posters, calenders and greeting cards. By the 1920s, Parrish's work in such demand that his paintings were reproduced for distribution as prints. ÿ
By 1898, Parrish had settled in Cornish, New Hampshire, where his father had built a residence five years earlier. He visited Europe in 1898, while during the years between 1900 and 1902 Parrish painted in Saranac Lake, New York and Hot Springs, Arizona, in an attempt to recover from tuberculosis. It was in the Adirondacks that Parrish changed from his early ink line and stipple method to using pigments thinned with oil, a development caused by mountain temperatures freezing his inks.
Although Parrish also traveled to Italy in 1903 on illustration projects, Cornish was his permanent home. He and his wife Lydia Austin, whom he had married in 1895, built "The Oaks," which was destroyed by fire in 1979. From the early years of the 1930s until his death, he painted the landscape around his studio and home almost exclusively.
Parrish considered himself "strictly a `popular' artist" (New York Times, March 31, 1966, obit), and his dreamÄlike fantasies were well suited to public taste. But, his style was immediately recognizable, and his technical skills are evident in his decorative, graceful style of line and glowing, distinctive glazing methods. He developed a distinctive palette, becoming known for his "Parrish blue," a vivid color derived from a lapis lazuliÄbased pigment. Although his reputation slipped into obscurity during the forties and fifties, Parrish's work was revived in the sixties with the advent of the Pop and Op styles.
