16 Facts About Clara Sipprell

Clara Estelle Sipprell was a Canadian-born, early 20th-century photographer who lived most of her life in the United States.

Clara Sipprell was well known for her pictorial landscapes and for portraits of many famous actors, artists, writers and scientists.

Clara Estelle Sipprell was born in Tillsonburg, Ontario, Canada on October 31,1885.

Clara Sipprell was the sixth child and only daughter of Francis and Fanny Crabbe Sipprell.

Clara Sipprell's father died before she was born, and her mother had to find various housekeeping jobs in order to care for the family on her own.

Clara Sipprell taught me by letting me alone with my mistakes, and for that reason I never became conscious of the limitation of photography.

Clara Sipprell made a series of Autochome color prints and continued to prefer that process even after higher quality color film was created.

Clara Sipprell became involved in the activities of the Buffalo Camera Club, which, although its membership was closed to women at the time, allowed her to participate because her brother Frank was a member.

Clara Sipprell's interest, coupled with her own success, brought her invitations to speak at various photo clubs in New York City, and soon she was spending more time there than in Buffalo.

The big city better suited Clara Sipprell's growing bohemian tastes, which quickly came to include smoking cigars, and pipes; drinking bourbon, driving fast convertibles, and wearing capes, exotic jewelry and embroidered Slavic clothing.

Clara Sipprell was a traditional pictorialist, interested in simple beauty and soft-focus imagery, and she kept this same aesthetic vision whether she was taking portraits, landscapes or still lifes.

Clara Sipprell continued her friendship and living arrangement with the Khrabroffs, even after they had a daughter in 1927.

The Khrabroffs remained loyal to the ousted czarists, and they felt Clara Sipprell's continued association with some who were sympathetic to the Stalinists was intolerable.

In 1937 Clara Sipprell moved to Manchester, Vermont, at the suggestion of Vermont poets Walter Hard and Robert Frost.

Clara Sipprell died in April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine.

Clara Sipprell's ashes are buried in a plot near an outcropping of rock in Dellwood Cemetery.