Edward Simmons

Edward Emerson Simmons was a multi-talented artist whose work encompassed marine and figure painting, allegorical murals, and stained glass design. Simmons was born in Concord, Massachusetts, of an old but impoverished New England family. He grew up revering philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, his mother’s cousin and a neighbor. At Harvard University, Simmons developed his interests in both art and writing. After graduation, he dabbled with the idea of becoming an architect in New York, traveled to Cincinnati and Chicago, and worked as a drama critic and teacher in San Francisco, where he met artist Childe Hassam.

Determined to become a painter, Simmons went to Paris in 1879 and enrolled at the Académie Julian, a popular school among American artists. His early images of idealized European peasant life met with some critical success when exhibited in Paris, London, and Boston. Simmons married in 1883 and settled with his family in the French coastal town of Concarneau, the site of a flourishing artists’ colony of which he became a prominent member. There, he painted outdoor figural subjects. He turned to marine painting during five years spent on the English coast at St. Ives, where he was a founder of another important art colony.

Simmons returned to America in 1891 to work on a pair of stained glass windows for Harvard’s Memorial Hall, a commission from his college class. After creating mural decorations for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he decided to devote himself to mural painting, preferring the public medium over easel painting for its greater exposure, impact, and permanence. Over the next two decades, he received commissions for projects in important new buildings from Boston to California.

Ironically, Simmons is best remembered today for his association with the independent artists’ group known as Ten American Painters, of which he was invited to become a member by his friend Hassam when the group was formed in 1898. The Ten, as it was known, consisted of painters sympathetic to the style known as impressionism, which emphasized modern, everyday subjects painted in the bright colors of outdoors with distinct, rapidly applied brushstrokes. Like other members of the group, Simmons occasionally painted out-of-doors images of family members and friends at leisure at New England resorts; he also painted coastal landscapes, urban views, and interior figural works. However, he exhibited only rarely with the Ten, preferring to paint murals. It was for these projects in state houses, courthouses, and other public spaces that Simmons was honored by his contemporaries. As a result, he remains today the least known of the artists who formed The Ten.