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Marcella Comès Winslow, a prominent Washington portrait painter, whose Georgetown home in the 1940s and 1950s was an informal literary salon for writers and other notables, died July 6, 2000, at the Knollwood retirement center in Washington. She had taught painting at Catholic University from 1965 to 1969 and was a past D.C. chapter president and a national vice president of Artists Equity.

Mrs. Winslow, who came to Washington in 1943, lived at 3106 P Street, NW, until moving to Knollwood in 1994. During her Georgetown years, she hosted such writers as Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Allen Tate. Tate and Welty used portraits by Mrs. Winslow on the covers of their books. Katherine Anne Porter lived at Mrs. Winslow's P Street house from April through September 1944, when she was serving as Fellow in Regional Literature at the Library of Congress. The two women remained on friendly terms for the remainder of Porter's life. While Porter was living at her home, Mrs. Winslow began painting her portrait.

Another of Mrs. Winslow's guests and the subject of a 1960s portrait was Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the legendary Washington social figure who was the widow of a House speaker and daughter of a president. They became acquainted because Longworth was a huge fan of the work of Memphis novelist, Anne Goodwin Winslow, the painter's mother-in-law. In 1993, the National Portrait Gallery held an exhibition dedicated to Mrs. Winslow's portraits of American writers that included Porter, Welty, Warren, and Tate, as well as Ezra Pound and Robert Frost. In an 1989 article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Mrs. Winslow recalled such adventures as painting Pound's portrait while the poet was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital and her work on Frost's portrait. Frost told her that "nobody could expect me to finish a poem in a certain amount of time, and you must take all the time you need on this painting." Frost later wrote in her guest book, "Robert Frost, who would be willing to be remembered the way Marcella Winslow made him look." In addition to the National Portrait Gallery, the Nimitz Library in Annapolis and the library of Eliot House at Harvard University include portraits by her.

Mrs. Winslow was a native of Pittsburgh, where she attended the Carnegie School of Fine Arts. She also studied art in London, Florence and Rome. In 1993, she published the book Brushes With the Literary: Letters of a Washington Artist 1943-1959. They featured her correspondence with her mother-in-law, telling a story of literary and artistic Washington. Her husband, Army Colonel William R. Winslow, died in Europe during World War II. Survivors include a son, John R. Winslow, and a daughter, Mary Winslow Poole, both of Washington; a sister; and six grandchildren.