Arabian Nights - The Art of Maxfield Parrish

1909

Comment on Books of the Day:

The Art of Maxfield Parrish.

Some time ago — in fact, it was while Robert Louis Stevenson's letters were appearing in serial form — Scribner's Magazine produced in the course of a year four cover designs of exceptional character. They were so different in conception, composition and in color from the work of any other illustrator that they seemed to some of us Stevenson-worshippers worthy of being bound in the book with the letters of R. L. S.. They were the work of Maxfield Parrish, who now, at the beginning of his fortieth year, finds himself ranked in public estimation along with Howard Pyle, at whose feet he sat as a disciple.

The delicate strength and quaint humor of Mr. Parrish's work is again in evidence in twelve drawings, a cover design and fly leaf and the title page decorations for the new collection of tales from the "Arabian Nights Entertainments" which the Scribners have published, with Kate Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith as editors.

An imaginative, humorous and gifted painter could have no better subject for his art. The Arabian Nights bewildering, unparalleled in their exaggeration, which have delighted childhood in China, India, Arabia, Persia and perhaps the islands of the moon since the year 1450 or before, and which so charmed the young men of the Royal College of Paris in 1704 that they gathered in the middle of the night under the windows of M. Gallaud, whose translation of some of these tales had just appeared, crying with one accord, "O thou, who knowest these so beautiful stories, and who tellest them so well, tell us one now!" have precisely the antique richness and wonder that is suited for the art of Maxfield Parrish.

The story of Ali Baba suggests heaps of gold, caves encrusted with gems, and a gleam of sunlight resting upon an Oriental figure who sits desperately trying to remember the magic words which will release him. Mr. Parrish has done the thing to perfection in flat tones of gloomy olive green. The story of "The City of Brass" contains the passage "And when they had ascended that mountain they saw a city than which eyes had not beheld any greater." Mr. Parrish has shown it; three horsemen from the desert upon a rocky promontory, before them a pellucid body of water, beyond that mountains dim in the shadow, farther away great peaks bathed in the warm orange sunlight, and back and above all, towering into the still blue, the great battlemented eminence of an incredible city all yellow and pale green, with clouds upon its crest. It is a splendid answer to the instinctive human desire for a wonder that fills the eye.

There are those who say that Mr. Parrish's work is deficient in the qualities of true art. That has been said, as Mr. Kipling has reminded us, ever since old Adam scratched with his stick in the mold, and the rude figures that he drew himself were joy to his mighty heart till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, "It's pretty, but is it art?" From what canons other artists have condemned Mr. Parrish's work I know not, but certainly he has achieved effects of light, shade, perspective, color, and mystery that make his work superbly suitable in such a connection as this.

In her introduction Kate Douglas Wiggin quotes Andrew Lang, who has left out of his vision of the Arabian Nights "all the pieces that are suitable only for Arabs and old gentlemen." So has she, but she has removed no genie or magician, however terrible, and diminished the size of no roe's egg, and omitted no single allusion to the great and only Haroun Al Raschid, Caliph of Bagdad. — P. M. P.

—The Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY, Nov. 6, 1909, p. 4.