Maxfield Parrish (July 25, 1870 – March 30, 1966) was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century.

Between 1884 and 1886, his parents took Parrish to Europe, where he toured England, Italy, and France, was exposed to architecture and the paintings by the old masters, and studied at the Paris school of Dr.

A year later, with his father's encouragement, he attended the Drexel Institute of Art, Science & Industry[2] where he studied with Howard Pyle.

[5] Parrish entered into an artistic career that lasted for more than half a century, and which helped shape the Golden Age of illustration and American visual arts.

[2] Parrish's commercial art included many prestigious projects, among which were Eugene Field's Poems of Childhood in 1904,[10] and such traditional works as Arabian Nights in 1909.

[15] In 1910 Parrish received a commission to create 18 panels to go into the Girls Dining Room of the Curtis Publishing Company building, then under construction at 6th and Walnut in Philadelphia.

Tiffany Studios constructed a favrile glass mosaic mural titled The Dream Garden,[17] which is now a part of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts collection.

This process involves applying layers of translucent paint and oil medium (glazes) over a base rendering.

Although you will rarely see a glimpse of that color in reality, he was and still is linked with a particularly bright shade of blue that coated the skies of his landscapes.

When exposed to ultraviolet light, the resins he employed, known as Damar, fluoresce a shade of yellow-green, giving the painted sky its distinctive turquoise tint.

He would take pictures of models in black and white geometric prints and project the image onto his works.

[24] The outer proportions and internal divisions of Parrish's compositions were carefully calculated in accordance with geometric principles such as root rectangles and the golden ratio.

The cover of the 1985 Bloom County cartoon collection Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things comprises elements of Daybreak, The Garden of Allah, and The Lute Players.

[26] The 1986 television commercial announcing Nestle's Alpine White chocolate bar, entitled "Sweet Dreams," staged live-action representations of Parrish's Ecstasy, Dinky Bird, and Daybreak.

In 1984, Dali's Car, the British New Wave project of Peter Murphy and Mick Karn, used Daybreak as the cover art of their only album, The Waking Hour.

The cover art of her 1995 album The Memory of Trees is based on his painting The Young King of the Black Isles.

In the 1995 music video "You Are Not Alone", Michael Jackson and his then wife Lisa Marie Presley appear semi-nude in emulation of Daybreak.

[30] The Italian singer-songwriter Angelo Branduardi's fourth album La pulce d'acqua of 1977 featured nine inlay full colour print reproductions of painter Mario Convertino's works; one of them is clearly inspired by Parrish's Stars.

[33] While studying at Drexel, Parrish met his future wife, Lydia Ambler Austin, who was a drawing teacher.

[8] From 1900 to 1902, Parrish painted in Saranac Lake, New York, and Castle Hot Springs, Arizona, to further recover his health.