The Lantern Bearers

Parrish painted The Lantern Bearers in 1908, during what many critics regard as the peak decade of his commercial and fine-art reputation. The work was commissioned as part of a series of decorative paintings for a set of large color reproductions published by Collier's Weekly and later issued as prints through the House of Art, which distributed Parrish's work to an enormous popular audience across America. At this point in his career, Parrish had already completed the celebrated murals for the Curtis Publishing Company and was refining the distinctive glazing process that would become his technical signature: thin, luminous layers of oil and varnish built up over a base of precise underdrawing, producing a depth of color that photographic reproduction could only approximate. The Pierrot figure was a recurring motif in the Belle Epoque decorative arts tradition Parrish absorbed from European poster culture, but he stripped away the melancholy associations of the commedia dell'arte character, replacing irony with a serene, almost ritualistic pageantry. The painting belongs to a tradition of American Symbolist-inflected decorative art that sought a public mythology of beauty, and it anticipates the chromatic intensity that would define Parrish's later landscape work under what became known colloquially as "Parrish blue."