Creator Record
Metadata
Name |
Franklin Simmons |
Role |
Artist |
Nationality |
American |
Dates & places of birth and death |
1839-1913 |
Notes |
Franklin Simmons was one of the second-generation expatriate American sculptors who settled in Rome and devoted his career to "the attempt to perpetuate a pure classical ideal in the second half of the 19th century." Born in Lisbon (later Webster), Maine, in 1839, Simmons went to Boston and briefly studied sculpture with another native of Maine, John Adams Jackson. Thereafter, Simmons returned to Maine and was active in Lewiston, Bowdoin, and later Portland, where he specialized in making portrait busts of prominent local citizens. He worked in Washington, D.C., from 1865 to 1866, and went to Italy in 1867 after receiving a commission from the state of Rhode Island to make a full-length statue of Roger Williams for Statuary Hall in The U.S. Capitol. |
