A landscape and figure painter and stained-glass designer, Clara Parrish was born and raised on her family’s plantation outside of Selma, Alabama. In the early 1880s, she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase, W. Siddons Mowbray, Kenyon Cox, and J. Alden Weir. She spent much time in Paris, maintaining studios there and in New York, and in Paris she attended the Academy Colarossi. In the 1890s she began working for Louis Comfort Tiffany as a stain-glass window designer. Among her designs were the windows for St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in New York City and at least one mosaic mural for Alabama churches. She exhibited widely including the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, the Royal Academy in London and the Paris Salon. She was a member of the New York Watercolor Club and the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors.
Source: North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century by Jules and Nancy Heller.
