Autumn

Maxfield Parrish

Print on paper

Community

This luminous print was created by Maxfield Parrish as an illustration to accompany John Keats' celebrated ode 'To Autumn,' evoking the poem's imagery of winged seeds borne on the breath of the season to their dark wintry bed. The composition glows with Parrish's hallmark saturated hues and idealized neo-classical figures set against a richly detailed natural landscape, rendered through his innovative layering of oil glazes that gives the image an otherworldly, dreamlike radiance. Parrish (1870–1966) was the defining illustrator of America's Golden Age of Illustration, a Philadelphia-born artist trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts whose bold color palette and meticulous technique made him the most popular commercial artist of his era. Hanging this work in your home means owning a piece of that golden age — a marriage of Romantic poetry and visionary American illustration that captivated an entire nation.