Sale of Maxfield Parrish’s most famous painting finances home for collection

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This article was published 29/06/2006 (7388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WINDSOR, Vt. (AP) – It’s now even more relevant that a Vermont art exhibit featuring Maxfield Parrish is called Coming Home.

Parrish’s most famous painting sold at a New York auction in late May for $7.6 million US and the anonymous California seller has agreed to give some of the proceeds – $300,000 – to finance a Vermont museum that houses what is believed to be the largest collection of the artist’s works in the country.

The money will be used as a downpayment to buy the building in which the museum now rents space.

“Maxfield Parrish will allow the Cornish Colony Museum to have a home at last, a permanent home,” says curator and museum director Alma Gilbert-Smith.

The price paid for Daybreak, which is a record for a Parrish piece, confirms what Gilbert-Smith, a former art collector, has been working toward most of her career.

“What it says to me . . . is that American collectors are recognizing Maxfield Parrish as important as an artist and putting in an appropriate premium on his best works,” says Eric Widing, Christie’s head of American paintings.

Finding a home for Parrish’s works has been a long struggle for Gilbert-Smith. In 1978, the California art collector bought Parrish’s former home in Plainfield, N.H., and decided to turn it into a museum.

Through a fire that destroyed the building, bankruptcy, a move back to California and a return to New Hampshire, she operated a museum for a total of about 12 years, she says. Last year, when she and her husband decided to retire, the town of Windsor made an offer to move the museum across the river into rented space in Vermont.

Windsor officials recognized that closing the museum, which drew between 10,000 and 15,000 people a year to Plainfield, would hurt the local economy, says Rudy Hanecak, a member of the select board and a downtown development committee.

Gilbert-Smith promised to bring in Parrish originals for the current show from a travelling exhibit called Maxfield Parrish: Master of Make-Believe she curated last year that drew record attendance.

“Look at the way he creates and holds light,” she says, as she points to her favourite Parrish painting, Dingleton Farm, which she owns. “Even if I dim down the lights, look at how the painting retains that sense of light. Look at the instant of time, the atmospheric instant of beauty.”

Parrish, who is known for his brilliant, luminous landscapes and dreamlike scenes, started his career illustrating magazine covers, such as Collier’s, Harper’s, Hearst’s and Ladies Home Journal. In 1898, he and his wife moved to the Norwich-Cornish, N.H., area and became members of the Cornish Colony, a group of painters, sculptors and scholars.

There Parrish produced paintings and murals for wealthy patrons, such as the Astors, DuPonts, Whitneys and Vanderbilts. His Daybreak image became so popular in the 1920s that one in four households had a print of it on the wall, Gilbert-Smith says.

Coming Home, on view through Oct. 29, includes the works of three other Cornish Colony artists – Paul Manship, Barry Faulkner and William Zorach – who, like Parrish, all died 40 years ago in 1966.

On one wall is a 6.7-metre mural Parrish painted for the wealthy Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, believed to be his longest work. The 1918 mural depicting a congregation of people standing and sitting outdoors on golden steps below golden arches, marked his transformation into using bright hues and deep tones of blue.

After completing the mural, Parrish then demanded that lithographers who reproduced his paintings into prints accommodate his broad use of colour. Two printers complied.

The show includes a calendar illustrated for the Edison Mazda electric company from 1918 to 1934 and a cherished landscape painting that was a gift from Parrish to the local Windsor bank, now the Chittenden Bank.

Also on display are two restored works: a 1933 mural for Irenee DuPont, a luminous rockscape of blues and golds, and a study for the Old King Cole mural. Photographs and text describe the laborious restoration of the original Dupont mural, which Parrish repainted for his client after the mural deteriorated.

Windsor officials believe the exhibit could draw a record audience. “Given this year’s largest display of Parrish works in Northeast, fresh off a national exhibit of his works, it should bring in a lot of people,” Hanecak says.

The show is Gilbert-Smith’s last for the museum. She plans to retire this year and to curate another national exhibit in 2008. She says she’s pleased that Parrish’s originals have been seen, and doesn’t regret that she once owned the original “Daybreak” and sold it for $125,000 in 1974.

“Some of us prepare the way,” she says. “It’s like being an archer and you bend way back to allow your arrow to fly way up. I have allowed Mr. Parrish through the work of my back and my arms to allow his arrow to fly.”

For art collectors, Gilbert-Smith’s collections and 14 books about Parrish have brought the artist to light.

“We believe in Maxfield Parrish’s work . . . and Alma has persisted against all odds to keep his name before the public,” Widing says.