Cornish Colony Museum receives Parrish calendars

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(Host) A small Windsor museum’s collection has expanded with the donation of 17 works of art.

The Cornish Colony Museum plans to put the prints by Maxfield Parrish on permanent display later this year.

VPR’s Ross Sneyd reports.

(Sneyd) The Cornish Colony Museum is dedicated to the work of early 20th century artists who worked in the Upper Valley.

Maxfield Parrish is perhaps the most prominent of them. His prints were mass produced and widely collected in the 1920s and 1930s.

Jim Halperin is co-chairman of an art auction company in Dallas and he’s a Maxfield Parrish collector.

(Halperin) “Maxfield Parrish was one of the three most popular artists in the world in the 1920s, along with Cezzanne and Van Gogh. It was said that a copy of Daybreak, which was his most popular print, hung in one-quarter of all American homes in the 1920s.”

(Sneyd) That’s why Parrish was hired by the Edison Mazda company to illustrate a series of calendars from 1918 to 1934.

Edison Mazda – which eventually became General Electric – sold electric lights.

Edison Mazda wanted to promote the sale of what was then the new technology of the day. The company decided Parrish was the man to illustrate calendars intended to depict the idea of the “progression of light.”

Jim Halperin says Parrish was a good choice.

(Halperin) “They’re really some of the best artworks that he ever did. … What Parrish did with light was really quite incredible. You just have to look at them to see what I mean. But they really are just amazing works of art.”

(Sneyd) There were untold thousands of the calendars printed. But it’s rare today to find many that survive in their original condition, with all of the calendar pages intact. Often, people got the calendar and cut it in half so they could hang the print in their homes.

Only a handful of complete collections remain. And the Cornish Colony Museum displayed one of them earlier this year.

After the exhibit was over, museum director Alma Gilbert-Smith contacted the owner of the collection, Evan Quiros of Texas, to arrange their return.

Quiros had just lost his daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren in an airplane crash. He wasn’t ready to talk about the calendar collection.

Gilbert-Smith says Quiros eventually contacted her.

(Gilbert-Smith) “He called back last week and said, `I had wanted to surprise you. But it’s getting closer to the time and I’m traveling right now. But I wanted to let you know that I want to donate it to the museum to honor the work that you’ve done with Maxfield Parrish. And I want to honor the memory of my family with it.”’

(Sneyd) Quiros says he first thought about selling his collection. But then he got to thinking about the art. Each of the 18-by-nine-inch calendars depicts a young girl in a natural setting. They reminded him of his daughter.

(Quiros) “I guess they have an attachment to me because I collected them over the years when my daughter was young and still in the home. And when one would come up, I would locate one, we kind of got involved in it together, to getting it. So she was sort part of collecting it.”

(Sneyd) Quiros decided the best way to honor his daughter’s memory was to donate his collection to the Cornish Colony Museum. The collection will have a plaque to the memory of her and her family.

For VPR News, I’m Ross Sneyd.

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