Old White Birch

A single birch fills nearly the whole picture, its trunk splitting into pale limbs that catch the light like polished bone while everything behind it sinks into shadow. Maxfield Parrish painted it in his later years, when he had given up the fairy-tale maidens and costumed figures that made him famous. In 1931 he announced he was finished with "girls on rocks," and from then until his death in 1966 he painted almost nothing but New England landscape: birches, boulders, farmhouses, and enormous skies.

The glow comes from his method rather than from any trick of lighting. Parrish built his pictures in thin layers of oil glaze separated by coats of varnish, letting each one dry before adding the next, so light passes down through the color and bounces back off the white ground beneath. That is why the sky here seems lit from behind and why the mossy rocks in the foreground look almost enamelled. He worked from photographs and small handmade models of rocks and trees set up in his Cornish, New Hampshire studio, then assembled the scene like a stage set. Millions of Americans knew images like this one from Brown and Bigelow calendars, which is part of the reason his reputation took decades to recover among serious critics. Whether you find the effect magical or slightly artificial, the tree itself is convincingly drawn, and the pink valley receding into distant hills is worth following all the way to the horizon.