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Karl Bergemann Parsons (23 January 1884 – 30 September 1934) was a British stained glass artist associated with the Arts and Crafts movement.
From 1893 to 1898 he attended Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys School at New Cross in south London.
Throughout the 1900s he was to assist Whall on his major commissions and in 1905 drew some of the illustrations for Whall's book Stained Glass Work this along with fellow student Edward Woore. Parsons assisted Whall with the windows for Gloucester Cathedral and also those for Canterbury Cathedral, Southwell Minster, Tonbridge School Chapel, and churches in Ashbourne, Ledbury and Burford.
In 1907 he married Grace Millicent Simmons. She too studied at the Central School and became an Arts and Crafts Embroidery.
In 1908 he worked with Whall on the design and execution of apse windows for Cape Town Cathedral and in that year set up his own studio at the Glass House in Fulham. In the same year he began work on his first independent commission, a series of windows for St Alban, Hindhead. He also exhibited three designs at the Royal Academy and 25 September 1908 saw the birth of his daughter Margaret Rosetta.
It was the architect Herbert Baker who had asked Whall to take on the Cape Town windows and it was Baker's associate Fleming, who in later years was to invite Parsons to undertake other commissions in South Africa. Close connections with architects were important to people like Parsons and he was to have a similar relationship with Robert Lorimer in Scotland which was to lead to his receiving important Scottish commissions. Other important contacts were John Duke Coleridge, and Pick Everard. Whall had similarly benefitted from close ties to the likes of the architects John Dando Sedding and Henry Wilson.
During the period 1909 to 1910, he worked for a short period with Louis Davis, cartooning windows from Davis' designs. In 1910 he exhibited designs at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Certainly Parsons worked closely with Davis in 1910 on the windows for St Anseln church (seven lancets for the Holy Spirit chapel) and Holy Trinity in St Andrew's Fife (a five-light Crucifixion window). It was Davis who had introduced Parsons to Robert Lorimer. In 1910, Parsons lived at 38 Gainsborough Road in Bedford Park, London.
1911 saw the birth of his second daughter, Jacynth Mary, who became a book illustrator.
In 1912 he received a commission for the Rolls and Grace memorial window at Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey and in the next year his work was exhibited at the Ghent International Exhibition. It was in 1913 that Parsons met the Irish artist Harry Clarke. One was to influence the other.
Demobilised in 1918, he resumed work at the Glass House and went back to teaching at the Central School. As a teacher, Parsons was, like Whall before him, to inspire several of his pupils to become stained glass artists, including Lilian Pocock, Joseph Edward Nuttgens and Herbert Hendrie.
After the war there was a boom in demand for stained glass, particularly with many memorial windows being commissioned and Parsons appointed Edward Liddall Armitage as an assistant and later Leonard Potter. Both were ex-pupils.
1924 saw Parsons make what was to prove a seminal visit to Chartres where, with his brother Ambrose, he carried out a detailed study of medieval glass. Parsons wrote "So far as my knowledge goes, this world cannot show anything made by men so amazingly beautiful".
In 1927 he was commissioned to make the apse windows for the new St Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg.
1929 saw a collection of that he had written published by the Medici Society under the title Ann’s Book. His daughter Jacynth provided the illustrations. (The previous year she had illustrated Forty Nine Poems by W. H. Davies, also for Medici). Over the years Parsons had several of his poems published in anthologies and periodicals. In the same year he resigned from his teaching post at the Central School.
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