After graduating from a prepartory school near Lyons, New York, where his family had moved in 1870, DeWitt Parshall studied at DeVeaux College in Niagara Falls, from 1877Ä1881, and graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, New York in 1885. His artistic training began in 1886, when he entered the Royal Academy in Dresden for one year. He then studied at the Academie Julian in Paris. From 1888Ä1889, Parshall worked under Alexander Harrison, while also began to several years of study with the French academic painter Fernand Cormon. Parshall probably made sketching tours of Europe and Africa before he returned to the United States in 1892.
Parshall married Carrie Ewell in 1895, two years after he had settled in New York. Little is known about Parshall artistic activities from this time until 1910, when he travelled to Arizona at the invitation of the American Lithographic Company. Along with Thomas Moran, Elliott Daingerfield, F. Ballard Williams and Edward Potthast, Parshall was invited to do scenes of the Grand Canyon. The trip a significant one, for the canyon became his favorite subject. He depicted it from various points of view and under different weather conditions.
In 1912, Parshall was one of the founders of the Society of Men Who Paint the Far West, serving as secretary treasurer of the organization, which lasted until at least 1917. In that year, Parshall moved permanently to Montecito, a suburb of Santa Barbara, where he became a member of the local artist colony. After this time, picturesque landscapes and marines of California
entered his work. Parshall served as a vice president of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and was a director of the Faulkner Art Gallery of that city. He was also a member of the International Society of Arts and Letters and the Allied Artists of America. Parshall spent the last year of his life hospitalized after he suffered a stroke.