At Close of Day

That glowing green sky is not a fantasy. Maxfield Parrish built it up the slow way, laying thin transparent glazes of oil color over a bright white ground, varnishing between each one so light would pass down through the layers and bounce back. The effect is closer to stained glass than to ordinary painting, and it is why his skies have a strange inner brightness that photographs of his work never quite capture. The bare elm in the foreground is the other half of the trick: every twig is painted in sharp silhouette against that luminous field, so the tree reads almost like a paper cutout laid over a lamp.

Parrish spent most of his life in Plainfield, New Hampshire, and the white church with its tall steeple appears again and again in his winter pictures, borrowed from the village around him. By the time he made scenes like this, he had loudly given up the costumed maidens and fairy tale rocks that made him famous, declaring he was finished with "girls on rocks" and would paint landscapes instead. Most of them were commissioned as calendar images for the printing firm Brown and Bigelow, which meant millions of American homes had a Parrish winter hanging in the kitchen. That commercial life is part of the story rather than a blemish on it: the pictures were designed to be pleasant company all year, and this one, with its snow shading from lavender into blue and the small lit windows of the village, does exactly the job it was built for.