Theodore Spicer-Simson

Though English-born [albeit born in France to British subjects], Theodore Spicer-Simson spent most of his life in the United States and in France. He was a sculptor of portrait medallions. He took special pleasure in portraying bearded heads; he had great feeling for the decorative use of beards. In England George Bernard Shaw, Robert Bridges, and “A.E.,” offered scope for this, and his portraits of these men are among his best, but he also did some fine medallions of Thomas Hardy and Winston Churchill. His American subjects included Dreiser, Mencken, Elinor Wylie, Hervey Allen, Padraic Colum, and Van Wyck Brooks.

From his earliest youth Spicer-Simson knew precisely what he wanted to do in his life, and nothing could divert him from it. His parents tried to induce him to be a military officer and, when he refused, put him into his father’s brokerage firm in Le Havre, France. There, instead of keeping the books, he spent his time making sketches of the other clerks or of ships in the harbor.

He was a brave young man as well as a determined one—brave enough to ride one of those monstrous old-fashioned bicycles with the enormous wheel in front and the tiny one behind. One day this dangerous sport nearly ended his career when he lost control of the monster on a steep hill. He slid off behind and grabbed the frame of the bicycle which dragged him down the hill on his stomach. His only thought in these gruelling moments was: “Now, perhaps, I’ll never be an artist.”

Later, when he was doing his portrait-medallion of Thomas Hardy, he made it clear that there would be no flattering compromise. “Mr. Hardy,” he said at the first sitting, “I want you to know that I am making this portrait to please myself.” Hardy jumped up and put his hand on the young sculptor’s shoulder. “That,” he said, “is precisely why I write my poems.”

A book published in England, entitled “Men of Letters of the British Isles,” presented the English collection of his portrait-medallions, but no American collection was published. Two of the American portraits, however, were used as frontispieces. One was the head of Gamaliel Bradford in the volume of Bradford’s letters; the other, of Centurion Van Wyck Brooks, was the frontispiece of Brooks’s Days of the Phoenix.

Spicer-Simson had, for many years, a studio in Paris and lived in the village of Bourron, near Fontainebleau. During the German occupation he was put in an internment camp but was let out when his health failed. He also had a bungalow at Coconut Grove in Florida, and it was there that he died.

He received awards for his work from the National Sculpture Society and from the Numismatic Museum. He was a member of the Century for forty years and exhibited in the Art Gallery in the 1920’s.

Roger Burlingame
1960 Century Association Yearbook