Will Simmons

William Simmons was an American etcher, painter, and sculptor of wild life. He was best known for his etchings of animals, and his work is represented in the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution. His father was Edward Emerson Simmons (1852-1931), one of the famous group called 10 American Painters. William Simmons was also related to essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Simmons was born in an artists’ colony at the Costa Blanca in Spain, when his parents were traveling in Europe. The birth certificate lists him as Guglielmo Francisco Bernardino Esperanza Simmons y Schellenberger, which was anglicized to William Francis Bernard Simmons. However, he signed all his works as Will Simmons.

Simmons spent the early years of his life in Spain and France and then in England, before he returned to a place called Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, previously the home of both Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is now designated as a National Historic Landmark. Following early tutelage by his father, Simmons returned to Paris to study at the Académie Julian, where he developed an interest in animals. He spent most of his later life in Massachusetts as a member of several professional societies.

According to the signature, Simmons’ only oil painting known as Leaping Trout was only created in 1944 and therefore probably does not correlate to the one submitted in Berlin in 1936. In a biography, however, an earlier aquatint etching is mentioned entitled Splash, which is supposed to show a similar motif.