Parrish, Samuel Longstreth

Samuel Longstreth Parrish (1849-1932). A Quaker lawyer from a prominent WASP Philadelphia family, educated at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While studying at Harvard, Parrish developed a taste for the Italian Renaissance. After graduating from law school, he developed a successful law practice in Philadelphia. In the early 1880’s, Parrish moved his legal practice to New York City and began to summer in the Hamptons where he visited his family home in Southampton.

At that time, Long Island‘s East End had one of the highest concentration of cultural elites in the U.S. A popular summer resort then as it is now, quickly caught his interest and Parrish soon became an active member of the community.

Parrish began collecting Italian Renaissance art seriously in the early 1880s. During a trip to Italy in 1896, Parrish had the idea to build a museum in Southampton to house his rapidly growing collection of Italian Renaissance art and reproductions of classical Greek and Roman (Greco-Roman) statuary.

Upon his return, he bought a small parcel of land next to the Rogers Memorial Library on Jobs Lane and commissioned a fellow Southampton resident, the architect Grosvenor Atterbury (1869-1956), to design the building. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Atterbury continued to work on the design of the Museum over a period of nearly 20 years.