“Art involves a constant metamorphosis . . . due both to the nature of the creative act and to the ineluctable march of time.”

—Al Parker

Born on October 16, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri, Al Parker began his creative journey early in life. His precocious illustrations brought song lyrics to life on the rolls of his mother’s player piano, and he spent hours spent listening to jazz in the record department of his parents’ furniture store. At the age of fifteen, Parker took up the saxophone, and by the following summer, was proficient enough to lead his own Mississippi riverboat band. Musical excursions offered him the chance to sketch between sets and play with jazz greats like Louis Armstrong.

Parker played the saxophone, clarinet, and drums to fund his education, and from 1923 to 1928, studied art at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. His first professional assignment, a series of department store window displays, landed him a job in a commercial art studio, but the studio’s practice of signing its name to his efforts brought a frustrating tag of anonymity, and inspired him to set out on his own.

In 1930, a cover contest sponsored by House Beautiful brought Parker an honorable mention and an entrée into the world of national magazine publishing. His elegant, stylized drawings were soon sold to Ladies’ Home Journal. Judged to be “too far out” for fiction, his art first appeared on the fashion pages, and commenced a long association with the magazine. The artist’s first fiction manuscript came from Woman’s Home Companion in 1934, followed by a steady stream of assignments from Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, American, and Pictorial Review.

In 1936, Parker and his family moved to New York, the nation’s publishing center. For all of its exhilaration, life in New York was filled with unrelenting activity. Parker produced up to ten finished assignments each month and carried out the requisite social schedule that accompanied his success. Though he enjoyed living the life that he portrayed, he sought a place to work that would afford more space and less distraction. In 1938, he moved north to Larchmont, New York, and a year later, the first of his mother and daughter covers appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal. From 1940 to 1955, the Parker family lived in Westport, Connecticut, which boasted a community of noted magazine illustrators.

In 1955, Parker, who suffered from asthma, sought a change of climate. After a brief stay in Arizona where he was “knee deep in American Airlines ad art,” he settled in Carmel Valley, California, where he continued to paint and play music until his death in 1985. Parker was elected to the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame in 1965 and received honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design and the California College of Arts in 1978 and 1979, testament to his extraordinary accomplishments and his ongoing influence.