LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  AMERICAN ART  / 

58

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection FREDERICK MAXFIELD PARRISH (1870-1966) Villa...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:50,000.00 - 75,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection FREDERICK MAXFIELD PARRISH (1870-1966) Villa...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
FREDERICK MAXFIELD PARRISH
(1870-1966)
Villa d'Este, 1903
signed with initials "M.P." (lower right) signed, dated and inscribed again "Villa d'Este/ Maxfield Parrish/ The Oaks/ Windsor: Vermont, December of 1903" (on reverse)
oil on paper laid down on board
28 x 18 in. (71 x 46 cm) <p> Estimate: $50,000-75,000 <p> Provenance
Private Collection Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1979 <p> Exhibited
Boston, Maxfield Parrish, Williams and Everett Company, Winter 1904-Spring 1905 Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 28 <p> Literature
Edith Wharton, "Italian Villas and their Gardens," part IV, "Villas near Rome," The Century Magazine, 1904, p. 865 Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, New York, 1910, p. 126 A Collection of Colour Prints by Jules Guerin and Maxfield Parrish, Cleveland, 1917 Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Twentieth-Century American Painting, London, 1987, p. 32, no. 1 (illustrated, p. 33) <p> Maxfield Parrish's Villa d'Este was first published in The Century Magazine, April 1904. It is one of a series of paintings commissioned by The Century Company for the book, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, with text by Edith Wharton and pictures by Maxfield Parrish. First serialized in the magazine, the now widely collected book was published in fall of 1904. Parrish had been in Arizona painting scenes of the southwest in the winter of 1902-1903, when The Century Company made arrangements for him to travel to Italy. There he made site visits, photographs, and color notations in preparation for a series of paintings of Italian villas and gardens that he would paint at his studio in Cornish, New Hampshire. Edith Wharton traveled through Italy ahead of the artist, studying the villas, their history, and their gardens and relayed information to Parrish by letter about the features of each site that she expected to emphasize in her text. In July 1903, after they both had returned to the United States, Maxfield Parrish traveled to The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Massachusetts, to discuss details of their collaboration. In November, she wrote to ask him for a list of the pictures he planned to make for each site. Years later, in 1915, when writing to Parrish about a different matter, she recalled "our good talks in too-distant days," referring to discussions they had had during their collaboration. <p>In his painting Villa d'Este, Maxfield Parrish emphasized the garden, with its majestic cypress trees, hedges, urns and shaded paths. The façade of the villa itself is seen in the distance. Wharton, in the text, referred to the villa as "incomplete" and a "huge, featureless pile" and remarked that "These gardens have excited so much admiration that little thought has been given to the house, though it is sufficiently interesting to merit attention." In featuring the garden at Villa d'Este in his painting, Parrish produced a stunning and evocative work, one of which in her 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton would refer to as "Maxfield Parrish's brilliant idealizations of the Italian scene." <p>We are grateful to Coy L. Ludwig for cataloguing this lot.
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