[2][5] While a student, she won the 1926 First Prize (Equal) for a painting, Portrait of a Bearded Old Man, which remains in the collection of University College London, the Slade's parent body.

She was offered to opportunity to assist Rex Whistler with the decorations for Cunard's RMS Queen Mary, but declined, being, in her own words, "too shy".

[2] Later that year, after Smith accepted a position in Baghdad with the Assyrian Antiquities Service and the Iraq Museum, he and his wife moved there, leaving Harry in England with a nurse.

[6] Smith became Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum in 1930, and so he and Parker returned to London, and a house they purchased at 7, Fellows Road, Belsize Park.

[7] Many of Parker's canvases were destroyed in a 1941 air raid during World War II,[2] which damaged the Belsize Park house so badly that it was uninhabitable, and later demolished.