Background
Her parents were John Maryon Simeon and his wife Louisa Church who lived in London where she grew up.
Her parents were John Maryon Simeon and his wife Louisa Church who lived in London where she grew up.
She attended a girls school and later went to a boarding school in the Swiss city of Geneva. During the 1890s she studied sculpture in London at the Central School of Design, and from 1896 at the Royal College of Arts.
Edith Maryon was the second of six children. She exhibited at the Royal Academy. Maryon met Rudolf Steiner in 1912/13 and after the summer of 1914 she moved to Dornach.
She worked with Steiner on the construction of the first Goetheanum, and with him on the modelling and carving of the wooden sculpture The Representative of Humanity.
Steiner designed the nine-metre high sculpture to be placed in the first Goetheanum. Now on permanent display at the second Goetheanum, it shows a central, free-standing Christ holding a balance between the beings of Lucifer and Ahriman, representing opposing tendencies of expansion and contraction.
The sculpture was intended to present, in contrast to Michelangelo"s Last Judgment, Christ as mute and impersonal such that the beings that approach him must judge themselves. The following May, she died of tuberculosis.