Malcolm Parcell: The Wizard of Moon Lorn

Hidden among the hills near Prosperity, Washington County, Pennsylvania, stands a place that seems touched by enchantment. The cottage is called Moon Lorn, and for over sixty years it was home to Malcolm Parcell (1896–1987), one of western Pennsylvania’s most imaginative and quietly brilliant artists.

Moon Lorn wasn’t just Parcell’s home; it was the center of his world, a retreat for painting, dreaming, and turning imagination into art. The man and his home became so intertwined that locals came to call him “The Wizard of Moon Lorn.”

Malcolm Parcell’s Early Years in PA

Malcolm Parcell was born in 1896 in Claysville, Washington County, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three children of Rev. Stephen Lee Parcell, a Baptist minister, and Emma Lindsey Minor Parcell. The family moved to Washington, Pennsylvania, when Malcolm was six.

From an early age, Parcell showed an instinctive love for beauty and detail. He later reflected: “I realize now how inborn was my feeling for beauty. It leads to feelings of perfection… There is a strength in beauty that is the highest goal that man can achieve.”

Early Education and Career Start

In 1913, Parcell enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), where he studied under Arthur Watson Sparks and George Sotter, who were both noted American realist artists. He commuted daily from Washington to Pittsburgh by train and trolley, a 70-mile round trip journey. That discipline shaped both his work ethic and his grounded artistic vision.

Parcell’s early jobs included assisting on church murals for architect John T. Comes and designer Edward Trumbull. His first major success came in 1918 when he won first prize in the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh annual exhibition for Trinity Hall, a painting of an old military academy gate in Washington.

The Portrait that Made Malcolm Famous

In 1919, a portrait titled Louine changed everything. His subject, Helen Louine Gallagher, a Washington schoolteacher who became his model and later his wife, captivated viewers with her luminous presence. Sent to New York by a Pittsburgh art official, the painting won the Saltus Gold Medal for merit from the National Academy of Design.

This early triumph established Parcell’s reputation as a portraitist of rare sensitivity. He followed with major prizes from the Art Institute of Chicago, including the Logan Prize in 1924 for Jim McKee and the Harris Prize for Portrait of My Mother. By his late twenties, Parcell was showing in New York’s Macbeth Gallery and exhibiting regularly in the Carnegie International Exhibition. Between 1920 and 1950, he displayed 30 paintings over this 30-year span, an impressive feat for any American painter of his era.

Despite his growing fame, Parcell remained humble and rooted. He disliked the competitive gallery scene, once admitting, “I very seldom sent a work of mine to a competition. Someone else would always do it.”

Malcolm Returns Home

In the early 1920s, Parcell took advice from landscape painter J. Alden Weir, who told him: “Go back home — back to the source of your inspiration. Follow your own quest.”

Parcell did just that. He returned to Washington County and to a piece of land where he had played as a boy. The original structure was a simple log cabin, which he transformed into a rustic studio-home, part cabin, part cottage, surrounded by woodland and light.

He called it Moon Lorn, a name that evokes both solitude and wonder. The property became the heart of his creative life, a retreat from the noise of modernism that he found hollow. In 1964, he built an A-frame studio designed to capture northern light through a high clerestory window, the perfect illumination for his paintings.

The Wizard of Moon Lorn

“My work is not reality,” he once said, “but what you might call a halo around things, affecting scale and content. It’s not a reality anyone else would see.”

Parcell’s career was remarkably versatile. Though well known for portraits, he also painted landscapes, allegories, and what he called “mythologies” that he defined as mystical scenes featuring nudes, elves, and dreamlike creatures. He believed these works gave “form to legend” and reflected the inner life of his imagination.

He completed hundreds of commissioned portraits across the Midwest and East Coast, often traveling to cities like Chicago, Indianapolis, and New York to paint. Later in his career, he shifted to working from photographs, but always preferred live sittings, which he felt captured the true “construction” of a person.

The Cottage from Disrepair to AirBNB

Parcell lived at Moon Lorn until his death in 1987 at age 91, having spent more than six decades there. Afterward, the Malcolm Parcell Foundation purchased the property, hoping to preserve it as an artist’s retreat. The vision lasted about ten years before funding and upkeep faltered.

In the decades that followed, the property fell into severe disrepair. Vandals broke doors and windows, thieves stripped wiring and stained glass, and Moon Lorn became a ghost of its former self. In 2017, Preservation Pennsylvania included the property in its At Risk list of historic places in jeopardy of loss.

But like the light Parcell loved to paint, the story refused to fade.

In 2024, Farley and Ingrid Toothman, longtime admirers of Parcell’s work, purchased the property from Consol Energy. Judge Toothman, who had visited Parcell as a boy, led its restoration and revival, reopening Moon Lorn as an Airbnb and creative rental space for a way for new generations to experience the magic of the place that inspired so much art.

Malcolm’s philosophy that art surrounds life like “a halo around things” remains his most enduring legacy. And at Moon Lorn, beneath the shifting Pennsylvania light, that halo still seems to shine.

Where to See Malcolm’s Art

Today, Malcolm Parcell’s art can be found in the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Citizens Library. His murals are still visible in western Pennsylvania, including Books Are Many Lives to Live in the Citizens Library (1965) and seven large-scale historical murals in the George Washington Hotel in Washington.

Listen to Moon Lorn

Get a feel for the atmosphere of Moon Lorn. Listen to our playlist inspired by the artist and his home.

References Consulted:

• Artist’s once ‘enchanted’ Prosperity home, studio has fallen into disrepair. (2016, October 16). Observer-Reporter.
• Chute, Eleanor. (2014, June 29). Auction helps fund restoration of ‘Louine’ painting donated to Pittsburgh Public Schools. Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
• Miller, Donald. Malcolm Parcell: Wizard of Moon Lorn. Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA. 1985.
• Moon Lorn selected for Preservation. (2017, February 6). Observer-Reporter.