Background
He was born in Washington, District of Columbia to Mary and Frederick Sparks, a federal government clerk.
He was born in Washington, District of Columbia to Mary and Frederick Sparks, a federal government clerk.
He trained as an architect and also studied art in the evenings at the Corcoran Art School.
Sparks remained in Paris, France for ten years where he studied art at Académie Julian and Ecole des Beaux Arts. Arthur Hamerschlag, head of Andrew Carnegie"s new Carnegie Technical Schools, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, hired Sparks as the founding head of the Department of Painting and Illustration, where he taught for eleven years until 1919. Sparks, however, contracted Spanish flu that August and died in Philadelphia.
