Maxfield Parrish was originally born Frederick Parrish in 1870 into the artistic Philadelphia family of Stephen and Elizabeth Parrish. His father worked as an artist, and he introduced his son to art history, museums, and fine architecture. He traveled to Europe with his father, adorning his letters home with his own illustrations of what he had seen. Later, he lived with his father at a Massachusetts colony for artists after dropping out of Haverford College. Later, he continued his education at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and became interested in the illustrations of Howard Pyle; soon, he developed his own unique style as he pursued a career as an illustrator himself. Parrish had a fertile imagination, and he used it to create vibrant fantasy images in bold colors. He was particularly fond of all the hues of blue but especially what became known as "Parrish Blue", and he experimented with glazes to give the work a luminescent, glowing quality. His sense of scale and proportion gave his carefully designed work a larger than life quality that people loved.

Maxfield Parrish c. 1900

Demand for Parrish illustrations was so strong that he always maintained a strong pipeline of commissions and earned large sums of money for the day. He bored of the constraints of producing work for advertising, and he wanted to concentrate on producing paintings specifically with the intent of high quality lithographic print reproduction. In 1922, he produced his most famous and popular work "Daybreak." This scene is comprised of his daughter Jean and her friend Kitty Own, the daughter of the orator William Jennings Bryan. Like many Parrish works of this period, the girls are superimposed in a fantasy scene of vibrant colors and a type of sheen which was unique to Parrish. Later in life, he produced a series of lovely landscapes for Brown & Bigelow calendars published between 1937 and 1962. Maxfield Parrish continued working on an array of work until he turned 70 years old, enjoying spending time with his long time model and girlfriend Susan Lewin. He died 25 years later in 1966 at the age of 95, still at his New Hampshire estate which he had called home for so many years.

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