Betty Waldo Parish is known for her Ashcan-School inspired views of New York City, Provincetown, and the Adirondacks.  Parish was born in Cologne, Germany, to an American family.  They came to the United States prior to World War I; they first lived in Evanston, Illinois, and then moved to New York City, where Parish's first art teacher was Anne Goldthwaite.  As a young woman Parish attended the Spokane Arts Center (where she studied lithography with Robert O. Engard), the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and the Academie Julien, Paris.  In New York Parish attended Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and the Art Students League where she worked with Kenneth Hayes Miller, John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, and Eugene Speicher.  She was on the Printmaking Project of Works Progress Administration, in New York.

In the 1930s Parish was married briefly to Edward S. Leonard, an illustrator, and then to Whitney Darrow, Jr., the New Yorker magazine cartoonist.  In 1942 she married Richard Comyn Eames, a farm equipment specialist.  They lived in New York's Greenwich Village; she maintained a studio at 41 Union Square.  Their son Dickon Eames, was a sculptor, and their daughter, Elizabeth Eames Roebling, is a journalist.

Parish exhibited widely in the 1930s and 40s and received the Larkin Prize for oil painting, 1939.  Her work was included in the 100 Prints of the Year from the American Society of Etchers Exhibitions, 1941 and 1942, featured in a show at the LaCrosse College Library, Wisconsin, December, 1957, and included in the Exhibition of Contemporary American Prints, Bendigo Art Gallery, Australia, 1963.

Work by Parish was shown in Prints by Women, 1986, and The Artists of Union Square, 1987, Associated American Artists, New York, American Women at Work, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, 1991, Depression-Era Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library, 2003/2004, and Impressions of New York, Prints from the New-York Historical Society, 2004/2005.  Most recently it was included in Ashcans, Trains and Factories: Students and Followers of the Eight, Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina, 2008/2009, and Working through the Great Depression, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, NY, 2009.

Work by Parish is in significant permanent collections of American art through the United States.  In particular the New York Public Library and the Philadelphia Museum of Art have extensive collection of her work for the WPA.

In addition prints by Parish were included in our inaugural exhibition, Celebrating New York City, 1988, and in Artists of the League, 2005.

Among the collections with work by Parish (in additional to those mentioned above) are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, Syracuse University Art Galleries, Newark Museum, New Jersey, the Philadelphia Museum of art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Yale University Art Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, and the Kansas State Federation of Art Collection, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, the Seattle Art Museum, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Asheville Art Museum which also owns a portrait of Parish by Guy Pene du Bois, the Royal Academy, Brussels, and the British Museum, London.

Source:

Susan Teller Gallery, Courtesy, Karl Marxhausen, http://www.susantellergallery.com/cgi/STG_bio.pl?artist=parish