Sister Parish was the grande dame of American twentieth-century decorators and is credited with developing the style of interior decoration known as 'American Country Style'. Parish-Hadley, the decorating firm she founded and ran with her business partner, Albert Hadley, was extremely successful and it produced a huge body of work, but Sister's most famous client was Jacqueline Kennedy, for whom she worked at the White House and at Glen Ora, a presidential retreat in Virginia.
Chapter 1.
Patrician Roots
It is perhaps inevitable that if one has the nickname 'Sister' many will quite naturally assume you are of an ecclesiastical disposition, devoted to a life of prayer, penitence, and good works. Dorothy May 'Sister' Parish was certainly devoted to good works, although she belonged to no ecclesiastical order. She was in fact the grand dame of twentieth century American decorators. Born in the early twentieth century, 'Sister' (as she was known) lived all her life in the United States and is widely credited with developing that style of interior decoration know as the 'American Country look', a style as distinctive as the 'English Country House' style, largely created by Nancy Lancaster and John Fowler across the Atlantic in England. It is extraordinary that two of the most influential names in twentieth century interior decoration, Sister Parish and Nancy Lancaster, should have been born in the United States, a mere thirteen years apart, and to have died within a month of one another.
Unlike Nancy Lancaster, who was intensely proud of her Virginian roots, Dorothy Parish was a 'Yankee', a northerner through and through, and equally proud of it too. She was born on the 15th July 1910 at Morristown, New Jersey. Her parents were wealthy, but not vastly wealthy, as many people were in those pre First World War days. Her father, Gustav Hermann Kinnicutt (1877-1943) was a New York stockbroker who formed, with his uncle Gustav Kissel, the brokerage firm Kissel-Kinnicutt, which ultimately merged in 1932 to became Kidder, Peabody & Co. Educated at Harvard, 'Sister's' father chose to become a financier, unlike her grandfather, Dr. Frances Kinnicutt, who was an eminent physician and head of the Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Dr Kinnicutt had also gone to Harvard, and to Columbia University Medical School, after which he worked in Vienna, Heidelberg and London. He married Eleanora Kissel, the daughter of a German banking family who had settled in New York, hence Sister's father's Germanic names.
Sister was to recall that her grandmother Kinnicutt (whom Sister never knew for she died in October 1910 when Sister was but a few months old) 'was a woman of distinct character and frozen expression - all bust, bustles, and severity'. She seems to have devoted considerable energy to placing 'No Spitting' signs all round the New York subway, a rather futile occupation one has to say. The Kinnicutts, by common consensus, seem to have had no taste - that almost mythical yet instinctive ability to create a beautiful home - for as Sister was to recall, her grandparents homes in New York and Sussex Avenue, Morristown, New Jersey, were 'large, dark and musty', full of 'polar bear rugs, moose heads, and antlers everywhere, golden oak furniture and dreary pastoral paintings'.
Her mother's side of the family, the Tuckerman's, were a completely different matter. Sister's mother, May Appleton Tuckerman (1887-1947) came from an old Yankee family. Indeed two of her ancestors were Cotton Mather, the Puritan Minister who was partly involved in the Salem Witch trials, and Oliver Wolcott who was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.Wolcott's son, Oliver Jr, became secretary to the treasury in the administrations of President's Washington and Adams, and it was his daughter Laura who married Colonel George Gibbs, a wealthy gentleman of Newport, Rhode Island. The Gibb's daughter, Elizabeth, married Lucius Tuckerman in 1844. Lucius Tuckerman's father was a clergyman, but Lucius became a pioneer in the manufacture of iron, creating with his brother Joseph a type of iron known as 'Ulster iron', which had greater tensile strength than normal iron, although it has now been superseded by steel. He lived in New York at Washington Place and then Madison Avenue, before moving to Washington D.C. where he built a large house on the corner of sixteenth and I streets. The house, long since demolished, had a fine collection of pictures, as did his country home at Stockbridge where he died in 1890.
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