Franklin Bachelder Simmons was a prominent American sculptor of the nineteenth century.
Background
Franklin Bachelder Simmons was born on January 11, 1839 in Lisbon (later Webster), Maine, the son of Loring and Dorothy (Batchelder) Simmons. John and Priscilla Alden of Plymouth, as well as Samuel Simmons, a Revolutionary veteran, were among his ancestors. He spent his boyhood at Bath and early showed an interest in art. He undertook modeling while he was employed in a mill at Lewiston, eventually reached the Boston studio of John Adams Jackson, and later opened a studio of his own in Lewiston. "The Newsboy, " modeled from life, was one of his early works.
Education
He studied at the Lewiston Falls Academy and, for a time at least, at the Maine State Seminary (later Bates College).
Career
Becoming an itinerant artist, he went from Waterville, the seat of Waterville (later Colby) College, where several of his early busts are preserved, to Brunswick, where he received the patronage of the Bowdoin faculty; in 1859 or 1860 he went to Portland, where he portrayed leading citizens in medallions and busts, and received his first commission for a statue, that of Maj. -Gen. Hiram Gregory Berry at Rockland. In the winters of 1865 and 1866 he was in Washington, making portraits of such leaders in political and military life as Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and David Glasgow Farragut.
He also designed the war memorial for Lewiston. As a result of securing a commission for a statue of Roger Williams, which was later placed by Rhode Island in Statuary Hall, Washington, he went to Italy with his wife, probably in the latter part of 1867, and thereafter lived in Rome, though he made occasional visits to America. A replica of the Williams statue was unveiled in Providence in 1877, with the addition of a figure representing history. Simmons' other works in Washington include the Naval Monument at the foot of Capitol Hill, erected in 1877; an equestrian statue of John Alexander Logan; statues of William King, the first governor of Maine, and Francis Harrison Pierpont, governor of the "restored" state of Virginia; and the heroic Grant, which was placed in the rotunda of the Capitol in 1900.
Meanwhile he made for Portland, Maine, in 1888 the seated Longfellow in bronze and in 1891 the Civil War monument, "The Republic. " Of his ideal works the "Penelope" in marble, of which four replicas were made, is considered his best; it is now in the Portland Society of Art.
During his last years he traveled much of the time and worked on his symbolic group, "Hercules and Alcestis, " which he finished not long before his death. He died suddenly in Rome just as he was about to return to America, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery there, the grave marked by a replica of his "Angel of the Resurrection. " He left his estate to the Portland Society of Art, where a collection of his works is preserved as the Franklin Simmons Memorial. Other examples are to be seen in the Portland public library, the Maine Historical Society, and the Greenleaf Law Library in Portland.
Achievements
Connections
On December 27, 1864, he married Emily J. Libbey of Auburn, Maine. His first wife died in 1872; twenty years later, June 9, 1892, he married Ella, Baroness von Jeinsen, daughter of John F. Slocum of Providence, who died in 1905. There were no children.