If, as the argument goes, every work of great art must undergo the crucible of creativity, then The Dream Garden certainly qualifies. It qualifies whether you consider this spectacular, 15-foot-high, 49-foot-wide mosaic a piece of art or architecture. Kim Sajet’s cover story (actually part of her master’s work at Bryn Mawr) unfurls the twists and turns—the legend—behind the masterwork housed since 1916 in the lobby of the Curtis Publishing Building on Center City Philadelphia’s Washington Square.

Maxfield Parrish came to Haverford in 1888 as a student from a Quaker family in Philadelphia only to leave early to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His chemistry notebook illustrations and other works are in Magill Library’s Special Collections, and rumor has it that several walls in Barclay were once canvases for his whimsical illustrations.

Parrish soon was an established artist in Philadelphia, working on 18 large murals for Curtis Publishing’s dining room. But, as Sajet explains in her piece, Parrish was not the first choice to create the painting after which the mosaic would be patterned. He was a meticulous, slow-working artist and, first choice as artist or not, his already heavy workload seemed to preclude him from this massive undertaking.

Parrish ended up painting The Dream Garden, though, and Louis Comfort Tiffany’s artisans produced more than 100,000 hand-fired pieces of multicolored glass and assembled the mosaic, using enlargements of Parrish’s original painting to guide their work. The final product weighed over four tons. When the 24 panels were assembled in Tiffany’s New York studios, more than 7,000 people came to see what Parrish and Tiffany had wrought before The Dream Garden was moved to Philadelphia. It took six months to install. It’s only fitting that, in the late 1990s, the mosaic mural had to endure a three-year battle to stay in its original home.

Scholars attribute The Dream Garden’s power and beauty to Parrish’s own passion for his garden at The Oaks, the New Hampshire estate where he worked for most of his life. That beauty lives on today. Rusty Kennedy’s cover photograph does it justice here, but to really appreciate The Dream Garden, the sheer magnitude and magnificence of it, you must pay a visit.

Maxfield Parrish would have wanted it that way.

Stephen Heacock

Executive Director of Marketing & Communications

P.S. We welcome Senior Writer John Lombardi to these pages. John is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine, among many others. His riffs on Frank Conroy and Guy Davenport—as well as several book reviews—appear in this issue.