“There are always pretty girls on every city street, but a man can’t step out of the subway and watch the clouds playing with the top of Mt. Ascutney. It’s the unattainable that appeals. Next best thing to seeing the ocean or the hills or the woods is enjoying a painting of them.”
In 1931, at the height of his popularity, Maxfield Parrish decided to abandon the figurative work that had made him a household name and devote his efforts entirely to landscape painting. The magical, detailed landscapes previously used as backgrounds for his figurative works now became the primary subjects; goddesses and nymphs were now replaced by another ideal—the mountains, rolling meadows, grand oak trees, farmhouses and open blue skies of the New Hampshire landscape. Concurrent with this commitment to landscape as his primary subject, Parrish began to work in a smaller format, abandoning the 30 by 24 inch size he favored in the early 1930s. Coy Ludwig observed, “his smaller paintings seemed to him more aesthetically successful than his larger ones. It was a wise decision, for his brilliant, enamel-like surfaces and intricately detailed subjects called for the smaller size” (Maxfield Parrish, New York, 1973, p. 177).
Painted in 1943, New Moon embodies the characteristics of Parrish’s most successful landscapes from this period and his idyllic vision of New England. He depicts a serene scene with a modest farmhouse framed by trees adorned with red and gold leaves emblematic of the changing seasons. A delicately rendered crescent moon hangs in the sky and the crystalline blue water of a pond is visible in the background. Parrish cleverly uses warm orange hues, which contrast the painting’s otherwise cool palette, to draw the viewer’s eye to the center of the composition. The illuminated windows are indisputably modern and evocative of René Magritte’s Empire of Light (L'empire des lumières) series executed a decade later.
Parrish’s skill is immediately apparent in New Moon. Each element of the scene is rendered with the calculated precision and intense palette that are integral to his artistic vocabulary. His labor-intensive method of applying layers of colored glazes over a white ground results in a surface that gives the impression of light shining through the hues. This technique also allowed him to achieve the super-saturated colors for which he is best known and are beautifully displayed in the present work. Indeed, a certain shade of cobalt blue was so strongly associated with the artist that it came to be known as “Parrish Blue,” presaging “International Klein Blue,” a deep ultramarine hue that was patented by the French artist Yves Klein in 1960.