Malcolm Stephens PARCELL
1896–1987, USA

Malcolm Parcell is considered by some persons to be the 'Grand Old Man of Southwestern Pennsylvania painters'. He is more immediately associated with Washington, Pennsylvania, the county's seat, and has spent most of his life in the area. He was born in Claysville, near Washington, and was introduced to painting by his father who had studied art before he entered the Baptist ministry, and by Malcolm's brother, Evans, who was a successful magazine illustrator. Parcell entered Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in 1916 and studied under Arthur Watson Sparks and George Sutter. The year he graduated in 1918 was also the year in which he was awarded the first prize in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh's exhibition for his portrait Louine. It was later purchased by the One Hundred Friends of Pittsburgh Art and presented to Pittsburgh's Board of Education for exhibit in one of their schools. In 1919 the award-winning portrait received the Saltus Gold Medal for Merit at the National Academy of Design in New York. The artist has spent a brief period in New York working as an illustrator for Scribner's, and was advised by J.Alden Weir, an artist himself who had purchased one of his paintings, to go home and paint his native area. In 1922 Parcell exhibited eight paintings in New York's Macbeth Gallery, and this was the second time he showed his work to a New York audience. That same year Parcell's painting, The Tease, was exhibited in the International Exhibition of Carnegie Institute. When the artist was 25, in 1923, he had a show of ten paintings in the Gillespie Gallery in Pittsburgh. The paintings were sold by the end of the third day and a critic pronounced the artist a prodigy. By the time he was 29, Parcell had exhibited in six Carnegie International Shows. In two of the shows, two of his portraits were voted the "Popular Prize" by the public. Parcell held a one-man show at the Carnegie Institute in 1935. His paintings showed familiar scenes from the life of an American town, such as Main Street and My Old Home. In 1937 the artist married the model for many of his paintings, including Louine. The model was a 34-year old schoolteacher from Washington named Helen Louine Gallagher. In 1965, he built a studio next to his house in the scenic hills near Prosperity, Pennsylvania and named this charming place "Moon Lorn."

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