Other former Yaddo residents include Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, and Sylvia Plath. For two or three years, she lived and worked in Florida at the Research Institute (now Maitland Art Center), which was run by Mary Louise Curtis Bok, later the wife of Efrem Zimbalist, and Andre Smith. Her works were exhibited at the Research Studio Gallery in late March and early April 1940. She encouraged gallery and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts shows of the works of self-taught Horace Pippin, of whom she said: "For me he is one of the few real artists in our century, when he is at his best." In the 1940 book "Pennsylvania; a Guide to the Keystone State", Sparhawk-Jones was identified as one of the state's "important young artists". William Alexander Newman Dorland also identified her as a talented woman painter, along with Cecilia Beaux and other American and English painters in his book "The Sum of Feminine Achievement". She reestablished a successful career of modern works in the 1940s, during which she lived in Philadelphia. Sparhawk-Jones has particularly had a following in Chicago and Philadelphia. In 1940, she combined watercolor and oil in "The Generations". Of her talent, realized in the painting, Marsden Hartley said, "It seems to be with something of a mental rapier that she conceives her subject matter for [her] pictures border on the exceptionally forceful and they are different in thought, as well as execution, from the work of most of the soft painters among men and women. She is a thinking painter with a rare sense of the drama of poetic and romantic incident." She painted with watercolor in the 1940s, producing works such as "The Dreamer" which is in the permanent collection of the Delaware Art Museum. Sparhawk-Jones was called a phenomenon in 1944 in an "American Artist" magazine, in which the author questioned, "Strange, that she is not recognized far and wide as among the ablest, most distinguished women painters in the United States." Sparhawk-Jones may not have attained greater fame, because at that time there was a "glass ceiling" for women artists that prevented them from attaining significant notoriety, according to biographer Townsend Ludington. Jerry Saltz of the "Village Voice", for example, found that modern women painters, born 1879 to 1969, only accounted for 5% of the paintings in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, which includes one of her paintings, "Startled Woman".