And much of that can be attributed to Alma Gilbert-Smith and Daybreak, the most popular Parrish painting.

On June 7, Gilbert-Smith, founder and director emeritus of the Cornish Colony Museum, signed a purchase agreement to buy a building on Main Street in Windsor, which will ultimately house the largest number of Parrish works in the country.

The purchase of the building was made possible after the painting Daybreak sold in late May for $7.6 million. The anonymous California seller of the painting offered to donate $300,000 toward the establishment of a permanent home to celebrate Parrish’s life. This had been a goal of Gilbert-Smith’s for 40 years.

The current exhibit at the Vermont Cornish Colony Museum, Coming Home, will be the last exhibit for Gilbert-Smith, who at 70 years old plans to retire from the museum this year.

“This individual contacted me and said, ‘Since you are retiring, and since you almost single-handedly brought Mr. Parrish to prominence, what can I do for you?’” Gilbert-Smith said. “I suggested a donation (for the museum) would be nice, and the seller thought that would be an appropriate way to celebrate.”

Gilbert-Smith is widely acknowledged as the foremost authority on Maxfield Parrish. She has written 14 books about Parrish, and has owned almost every major Parrish work, including Daybreak.

“I’ve owned more Parrishes than any human being, with the exception of Parrish,” she said. That comes down to about 400 Parrish works during the past 30 years.

Finding a permanent home for Parrish’s works has been a long struggle for Gilbert-Smith. In 1978, the California art collector bought Parrish’s former home in Plainfield, N.H., and turned it into a museum.

However, it was a year later that a fire destroyed the main building of the museum. The loss of the Parrish house was monumental, but Gilbert-Smith’s interests were totally focused on Parrish’s art.

“We didn’t lose any of the paintings,” she said, “not a one. We kept running into the house as it was burning to save the paintings. We lost the main house. I remember it was cold, and we threw snow onto the house in order to try and put the fire out.”

Although she said she never received much support from local or state interests in New Hampshire, she attempted to keep the museum open for almost 12 years.

Last year, when she and her husband decided to retire, the town of Windsor, about four miles from Plainfield, made an offer to move the museum across the river into rented space in Vermont.

As part of the agreement, Gilbert-Smith promised to bring in Parrish originals for the exhibit Coming Home from a national traveling exhibit she curated titled Maxfield Parrish: Master of Make-Believe.

The national traveling exhibit, sponsored by the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington, D.C., contained a number of Parrish murals, studies for murals, recovered artworks and restored paintings, some of which had never been previously exhibited. The exhibit drew record attendance in several of its museum venues.

A number of lenders to the traveling exhibition chose to honor Gilbert-Smith by lending their works to Coming Home, according to the museum website.

Coming Home is a five-month exhibit featuring 30 paintings by Parrish, in addition to calendar illustrations for the Edison Mazda electric company from 1918 to 1934. Also, on display is a landscape painting that was a gift from Parrish to a local Windsor bank. The exhibit will close Oct. 29

The exhibit will also display two restored works: a 1933 mural for Irenee DuPont, a luminous landscape of blues and golds, and a study for the Old King Cole mural.

Gilbert-Smith originally found the DuPont mural in 1978 in the attic of the old Parrish house. The restoration of the mural took more than four years to complete, but was finally accomplished in 2004 by students from Winterthur, the University of Delaware and the Save American Treasures program.

“This ambitious project, the restoration and preservation of Maxfield Parrish’s 1933 DuPont Mural, is the American equivalent of the restoration of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper,” Dr. Joyce Hill Stoner, a professor at the university, said.

Parrish, who is known for his luminous colors and dreamlike scenes, began his career illustrating magazine covers. He and his wife moved to New Hampshire shortly before the turn of the 20th century and became members of the Cornish Colony, a group of painters, sculptors and scholars.

The Daybreak image became so popular in the 1920s that one in four households had a print of it on the wall, Gilbert-Smith said.

She finds it ironic that the sale of Daybreak at $7.6 million, a record for any Parrish painting, would help finance the Cornish Colony Museum.

“It has been a dream that my work of 40 years can go on,” she said.

Contact: (802) 674-6008

Eric C. Rodenberg