Monumental Parrish Exhibition Smashes MAG Records

Maxfield Parrish, a commercially popular painter who fell out of favor with critics for much of the 20th century, is being seen in a new light, and a record-setting two-month exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery helped prove why his work deserves a second look.

More than 61,000 people visited MAG to see Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966, smashing the previous attendance record of 37,547 set in 1997 during the Sacred Sand Painting of Tibet exhibition.

Nearly 10,000 people went through the Parrish retrospective during its final week at MAG.

Deeply committed to the popularization of art, Parrish was the highest-paid artist in America by the 1920s, and his prints were said to hang in one out of every four households.

Among his early fans was George Eastman, who commissioned Parrish to paint three murals for the Eastman Theatre. One of those murals, Interlude: The Lute Players, which is now on long-term loan at MAG, was one of the 130 works in the traveling exhibition.

Organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the American Federation of Arts, it was the first-ever critical retrospective of Parrish's work and is the largest and most expensive exhibition ever shown at MAG.

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