The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (358 page)

(1870–1966).
American painter and illustrator. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with the author-illustrator Howard Pyle (1853–1911), celebrated for his children's books. In 1895 Parrish designed a cover for
Harper's Weekly
and thereafter rapidly made a name for himself with illustrations, posters, and advertisements. His greatest fame and popularity came with colour prints designed for the mass market. Sentimental scenes such as
The Garden of Allah
(copyrighted 1919) and
Dawn
(1920) sold by the million. They are in a lush and romantic style, set in an escapist world combining elements of the Arabian Nights, Hollywood, and classical antiquity, with languorous maidens and idyllic landscape backgrounds. His draughtsmanship and detailing are immaculate and his colouring distinctively high-keyed and luminous. Many of his advertisements were in a similar vein. In the 1930s his style went out of fashion and he retired to paint landscapes, working up to his death at the age of 95. Shortly before this there was a revival of interest in his work, which had long been dismissed as kitsch; in 1964, for example, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, bought his painting
Errant Pan
(
c.
1915).

 
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(1900–82).
American art dealer, collector, and painter. After Peggy
Guggenheim
closed her New York gallery in 1946, Parsons became for a few years the leading dealer of the
Abstract Expressionists
, until several of the major figures left her for Sidney
Janis
in the early 1950s. She continued to support avant-garde art, and by the time her New York gallery closed in 1977 she had represented many of the most famous names in American art over the previous three decades, especially
Colour Field
and
Minimal
painters.

 
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Pascin , Jules
(Julius Pincas )
,

(1885–1930).
Bulgarian-born painter and draughtsman. He led a wandering life, and although he acquired American citizenship when he moved to New York during the First World War, he is chiefly associated with Paris, where he belonged to the circle of artists at Montmartre who gravitated around
Chagall
,
Modigliani
, and
Soutine
. He did portraits of his friends and began a number of large paintings with biblical themes, but most of his work consists of erotically charged studies of the female nude. They have been compared to the work of
Degas
and
Toulouse-Lautrec
, but Pascin's paintings are less penetrating and more obviously posed. He can be rather repetitive, but his best work has great delicacy of colour and handling and a poignant sense of lost innocence. Pascin's work brought him financial success, but he had a dissolute life and was emotionally unstable. He committed suicide (slashing his wrists and then hanging himself).

 
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(1908– ).
British painter and maker of constructions who has achieved eminence as both a figurative and an abstract artist. After early experiments with abstraction he reverted to naturalistic painting, and in 1937 he combined with
Coldstream
and Claude
Rogers
in forming the
Euston Road School
. Characteristic of his work at this time and in the early 1940s are some splendid female nudes and lyrically sensitive Thames-side landscapes that have been likened to those of
Whistler
(
Chiswick Reach
, NG of Canada, Ottawa, 1943). In the late 1940s he underwent a dramatic conversion to pure abstract art, and by the early 1950s he had matured a personal style of geometrical abstraction. At the same time he made abstract
reliefs
, partly under the influence of Ben
Nicholson
. His earlier reliefs had a handmade quality but later, through the introduction of transparent perspex, he gave them the impersonal precision and finish of machine products (examples are in the Tate Gallery). Through work in this style he came to be regarded as one of the leaders of the
Constructivist
revival in Britain. Later paintings are less austere and more organic. Pasmore has been an influential teacher, notably at King's College, Newcastle upon Tyne (University of Durham), where he was head of the painting department, 1954–61. The ‘basic design’ course he taught there (based on
Bauhaus
ideas) spread to many British art schools. He has also been much concerned with bringing abstract art to the general public. In 1955, for example, he was appointed Consulting Director of Architectural Design for Peterlee New Town, County Durham, and designed an urban centre in the form of a Pavilion which integrated architectural design with abstract relief painting. Kenneth
Clark
described Pasmore as ‘one of the two or three most talented English painters of this century’.

 
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(1529–92).
Italian painter, who except for some years in Rome (
c.
1551–
c.
1565) worked in his native Bologna. There he had a large studio, which became the focal point of the city's artistic life. The religious paintings that were the basis of his success were fairly conventional and undistinguished, and he is now remembered for his pioneering
genre
scenes of butchers' shops (one of the few surviving examples is in the Galleria Nazionale, Rome). They reflect the influence of northern painters such as
Aertsen
and in their lively observation broke free from the prevailing
Mannerism
. Annibale
Carracci
(whose brother Agostino studied with Passarotti ) was influenced by these genre scenes in his early career. In addition to his religious and genre works, Passarotti painted excellent portraits throughout his career. His son
Tiburzio
(d.
c.
1612) imitated his style, and he in turn had two artist sons,
Gaspare
and
Archangelo
.