In 1923, The Boston Globe announced to a surprised American public that the country's most beloved painter was also a mechanic. Maxfield Parrish, "the painter of those brilliant landscape-s creator of the atmospheric fantasy of fairyland," had a work shop that would be the envy of many a machinist, and claimed to be not an artist who loved machinery, but a machinist who painted pictures. Parrish's audience, of course, knew him only as a painter and...