North Pasture, Winter

Snow covers almost everything here, broken only by a ridge of dark rock and bare ground running across the middle like a torn edge. Above it, the sky shifts from deep blue at the top down through green, then amber, then a warm dusty rose right at the horizon. That glowing color is the signature of Maxfield Parrish, an American painter and illustrator who built his images from many thin layers of oil glaze separated by coats of varnish. Light passes through the layers and bounces back off the white ground underneath, which is why the blue in his skies seems lit from behind. People started calling it "Parrish blue" while he was still alive.

Parrish spent most of his career as one of the most reproduced artists in America, famous for images of maidens on rocks and fantastical columned terraces. Around 1931 he announced he was finished with all that and turned to painting the hills around his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, mostly for calendar companies. Those calendar landscapes usually include a birch tree, a stone wall, a farmhouse with a lamp in the window. This one skips all of it. No trees, no buildings, no figures, not even a fence post to judge the scale. The result is stranger and emptier than most of his work, closer to a study of a color gradient than a portrait of a place, and it leaves you guessing whether that low light means the sun is coming up or going down.