With the support of her parents and two wealthy widows, she was able to devote her time to study and creative work and her sculptures made an immediate impact when first shown in the early 1930s.

[4] In 1926, during her senior year in a local private school, her mother brought her to France for a visit with her sister Anne who was studying in Paris.

During a visit to the Louvre, Caparn encountered an ancient sculpture, a kore of a young female acolyte from the Heraion of Samos.

[6] After graduating from high school, she spent two years as a student in Bryn Mawr College where an art history course in ancient Greek sculpture captured her attention.

[6] Caparn later credited two women with the guidance and financial aid she needed to complete her studies and embark on a career as a professional sculptor.

Elizabeth Alexander helped make Caparn's time in Paris "the most wonderful year in the world" by giving her and her sister a place to live, by finding studio space for her to work in, by arranging for her to study with Navellier, and, later, by encouraging her to attend classes with Archipenko.

She showed human and animal figures in marble, clay, and terracotta and the New York Times covered the event in its Society pages.

[note 6] Reviewing the show in the New York Sun, critic Henry McBride said she used "the freest lines for forms" to make emotionally charged works to which "the old-fashioned ideas of sculpture do not apply.

When she participated in a group show sponsored by Salons of America in 1936, Anita Brenner of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called attention to her "monstrous sculpture inspired by rubber tubes.

"[26][note 7] Late in the decade she received an invitation to join an outspoken group of extreme abstractionists called American Abstract Artists.

[28][32][note 9] In reviewing the show Howard Devree said, "Rhys Caparn's 'Bird' has about it more than a little of antique Chinese abstraction of treatment and her 'Stalking Cat' compasses sinister stealth.

"[33][34][35][note 10] In 1944 Caparn was elected president of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors (the organization she had helped to found four years earlier).

In that role she wrote the Museum of Modern Art to take issue with what she called its "increasingly reactionary policies" toward the work of American artists.

In the interview she said she saw her work was an extension of her life and added her regret that people tended to see art as something separate from the daily lives they led.

[39] The year after that she accompanied her husband on a trip to countries behind what was then being called the Iron Curtain and after her return began, for the first time, to sculpt landscape forms.

[40] A few years later she was one of eleven sculptors to represent the United States in a competition held in London on the subject, "The Unknown Political Prisoner."

The piece she presented, an abstract standing figure, did not win the award, but was nonetheless pictured in a New York Times article on the event.

"[2] When in 1958 she showed with two other sculptors at the American Museum of Natural History Preston wrote that "Rhys Caparn's carvings catch [her subjects] at fugitive moments, birds flying, gazelles leaping or horses rearing.

[46][note 12] During the 1950s and 1960s, Caparn continued to participate in group exhibitions held by the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors and the National Association of Women Artists.

Reviewing the show a critic for a local paper described architectural pieces that had not previously been noted, pointing to her use of "the sparsest elements—a single while wall and lintel of its portal, a couple of arches, a village square, a fragmented empty chapel.

"[40] Regarding a retrospective show in 1981 a critic for the New York Times wrote of landscape plaster reliefs that began to appear following her postwar trip to Eastern Europe and mentioned house shapes that had become a more recent preoccupation.

[46][50][51] In a national competition called "American Sculpture, 1951" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caparn's "Animal Form I" was awarded $2,500 as second prize.

Writing in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1936, Anita Brenner told readers that "charm and decorative value" could not yield first-rate works of art; to accomplish that feat required the power of emotion.

In 1933, Henry McBride, writing in the New York Sun had compared the emotional effect she achieved with the response listeners feel in a musical performance.

"[2] Caparn's sculptures, "Stalking Cat" (at right) and "Standing Bird" (at left) show her ability to create the expressive forms that critics saw in her work.

[62] Clara Caparn began teaching soon after moving to Manhattan in the early 1900s and, using the professional name "Mrs. C. Howard Royall," succeeded in attracting students among the matrons of New York's social elite and their daughters.

[8] Caparn's parents were married in Manhattan in 1906 after her mother had dissolved a marriage of 1889 to George Claiborne Royall (1860–1943), a merchant of Goldsboro, North Carolina.

He was an investment banker in the 1920s and subsequently held positions in the federal government in Washington, D.C.[68][69] As a child, Caparn enjoyed outdoor life on her family's rustic estate called Fernie Farm in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

[72][73][note 16] Complying with social practices of the time, Caparn's mother hosted a series of luncheons in her honor at the Cosmopolitan Club.

His obituary in the New York Times called him "a newspaperman and radio commentator whose career was marked by controversy over his outspoken left-wing views and his often sensational political and economic predictions.