Portrait of Anne Adams, Anne Parrish, Oil on Canvas
Artist BiographyÂ
Anne Lodge Parrish, born in Claymount, Delaware in 1859, thrived in a world of art and creativity. She married a fellow artist, Thomas Parrish (1846-1899), whom she met while they were students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The couple moved to Colorado Springs in 1885, although Thomas and his first wife, Fanny Cavender Parrish, a granddaughter of famed abolitionist and suffragist Lucretia Mott, moved to Colorado Springs in 1872 and lived there until Fannie’s death in 1883 at age 27.
In Colorado Springs, Thomas and Anne Lodge Parrish joined architect and artist Frank T. Lent to form the city’s first art school, modeled after the academies of Europe and the American East. Anne Lodge Parrish was known for portraiture and etchings, primarily from the 1890’s. Her oil portrait of Anne Adams, completed in 1888, hangs in the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. A portrait of her husband, Thomas, is part of the city’s El Paso Club collection. Both works demonstrate her considerable artistic skill.
Parrish was the mother of writer and book illustrator Anne Parrish Titzell (1888-1859) and of George Dillwyn Parrish (1894-1941)
Thomas Parrish was uncle to Maxwell Parrish, artist and illustrator during America’s “Golden Age of Illustration” in the first part of the twentieth century. Maxwell featured the Broadmoor Hotel, owned and operated by mining baron Spencer Penrose, in a painting that hangs in the hotel’s lobby. Thomas Parrish joined Count James Pourtales in the region’s early commercial development, including successful speculation in Cripple Creek gold. In Newport in the Rockies, historian Marshall Sprague points to Pourtales’s fortunes has having derived in part from investments in the early growth of the exclusive Broadmoor area at the foot of Cheyenne Mountain. These wealthy connections cemented Thomas and Anne’s roles as community leaders in both culture and commerce. Near the end of his life, Thomas was publisher of the Colorado Springs Gazette.
In a special edition of the Gazette, “Colorado Springs at 150 Years,” July 8, 2021, writer Linda Navarro cites Thomas and Anne Parrish as important early artists in the region, along with Charles Craig and Thomas Moran.
