Pinckney Marcius-Simons (1867Les Courtesans, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; a primary source for this date has not been located.—July 17, 1909"P. Marcius Simons" (obituary), American Art News.) was a New York-born artist who spent his youth in Spain, Italy, and France. He studied painting under Jehan Georges Vibert, eventually joining the painter’s household.Sheldon, p. 28. Continuing to reside in France, he exhibited at the Paris Salon at an early age and quickly established himself as a successful genre painter. In the 1890s (perhaps following a serious illnessAnonymous (1895a).), he radically changed his subject matter and technique. Sometimes classified as Symbolist,Anonymous (1897). his phantasmagoric later works depicted Christian religious visions, elements of Classical mythology, and scenes inspired by the operas of Richard Wagner. His works were greatly admired by Teddy Roosevelt, who owned four paintings by Maricus-Simons and called him "a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist; and a man with a vision more wonderful still."Roosevelt, Theodore (1913), p. 358. In 1908 he was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Described from the beginning of his career as "delicate in health," he died in his forties in Bayreuth, where he was buried. In his lifetime his works fiercely divided critics and were avidly sought by collectors, but after his death he was largely forgotten.
Education and early success
Marcius-Simons was barely in his twenties when he painted The Child Canova Modeling a Lion Out of ButterNow at the Chrysler Museum of Art. and Young Lulli, pendant paintings depicting two legendary child prodigies.
These and other paintings came to the attention of art critic George William Sheldon, who championed Marcius-Simons in his 1888 book Recent Ideals of American Art. "The artist was born in New York City," Sheldon wrote, but was brought to France in infancy for his health. He is now (1888) twenty-five years old,This reckoning conflicts with the birth year usually given for Marcius-Simons' birth, 1867. though looking scarcely more than eighteen, and has visited his native land but once since his departure from it. Slight in figure, nervous in manner, delicate in health, with regular features and an aristocratic expression, speaking English brokenly, but using it in preference to any other tongue….much of his life was spent in Spain and Italy, but his academic education was pursued at the celebrated Vaugirard College in Paris, under the direction of the Jesuits. So successful was he in his studies that he received the unusual permission to study art also during his collegiate course; and, when the distinguished painter Vibert had resolved to receive some pupils, the youngest of the group was Marcius-Simons, who had been recommended by the celebrated Detaille. The American’s health was severely tried by the resolute ambition which made him simultaneously a collegian and an art-student; and, as if still further to test it, Vibert invited him to become a member of his family after the regular term of his atelier had closed, thus giving him an extraordinary opportunity for mastering the art that he loved.
His training as an artist began at age twelve, and "his first painting was signed at sixteen.…To build his cathedrals and fairy palaces, he studied architecture…To evolve scientifically evanescent angels, he studied anatomy, until the late Gérôme stopped him, saying: ‘You wish to become a painter, not a doctor!'"
He made his public debut in 1891, exhibiting genre paintings at both the Paris SalonThe painting was Les Premières voiles—retour de la pêche du hareng (Hébrides); see Catalogue Illustré…1891, pp. XVIII and 64. and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.The painting was Crushed Hopes; see Royal Academy of Arts (1891), p. 63.
Works by Marcius-Simons before 1892 can be dated by the earlier, less stylized signature of his hyphenated names in all-capitals with the final stroke on the letter "R" elongated.
Transition to Symbolism
At the Paris Salon of 1892, Marcius-Simons exhibited Mon royaume n’est pas de ce monde (My Kingdom Is Not of This Earth). The style still reflected the precision of his academic training, but the imagery was hallucinatory. The painting also bore the distinctive signature he would use thereafter. Mon royaume… drew both praise and derision. Alexandre Hepp called it "a great painting," and Marcius-Simons "a great mystical artist."Hepp (1896). Étienne Durand saw a depiction ofthe reverie of the principle figure dressed in red, a prince of the church…Around him, like motes populating a ray of sunshine, crowd together the most disparate visions, capable satisfying all human passions and appetites: love, ambition, avarice, sensuality, dissipation, etc. In a corner, the divine child, sleeping in his crib, shines with a bright halo; above him, vague and diaphanous forms of celestial beings glide in the radiance of the stained glass windows. It is a bizarre composition that seems at first sight incoherent, like a feverish hallucination, but which becomes clearer as one studies it and discovers, rendered with astonishing clarity, the moral kaleidoscope of meditation. As for the painting, it is extraordinarily elegant, precise and brilliant.Durand (1892).
But a British critic was not impressed. "So faulty in this matter is the design, the eye travels in puzzled and bewildered amazement…The discovery of the Christ-child…elucidates the mystery, but it in no wise explains why Mr. Marcius-Simons, who obviously has the gift of imagination, should be so wofully lacking in style."Dixon (1892).
In 1893 he exhibited Chant du Cygne at the Salon; The New York Times wrote that Marcius-Simons "is astonishing by the constant evolution of his own personality."L.K., "The New Salon of Paris" in The New York Times, June 19, 1893, p. 9. But in a plea for "A Sane View," James Stanley Little dismissed Marcius-Simons as a passing fashion.Little (1894), p. 71.
Also in 1893 he exhibited at the Salon de la Rose + Croix in Paris, curated by Joséphin Péladan, an avant-garde showcase for artists, writers, and composers that grew out of Péladan's cultic religious movement, the Mystic Order of the Rose + Croix. Marcius-Simons subsequently exhibited at three more of Péladan’s salons.M-S’s works at the SdR+C included Esquisse and L'âge de la Foi, 1893; Jeanne d'Arc (L'Attente), La Fièvre, La Tentation, Le Jour, Saint Georges et le Dragon (Légende), Vous, coeurs aimants! (gouache), 1894; Fleur de France, 1895; La Soif de l'Or and Les Bâtisseurs de la ville (La Renaissance), 1897. His ties to Rosicrucianism would draw censure from some quarters.Anonymous (1895a): "Mr. Pinkney Marcius-Simons…when he comes to glorifying the rotten race of the Bourbon kings, and presenting as claimants to martyrdom the ermined and crowned savages whose very blood stank as it filled their putrid bodies, he is a—Rosicrucian indeed."
Léon Roger-Milès, reviewing La Rayonnement de la Croix and La Parabole des Vierges at the Paris Salon of 1894, called Marcius-Simons "exceptionally gifted…a mystic who brings to the end of our century a distant echo of the imaginations of the fourteenth century."Roger-Milès (1894).
Avery Art Galleries shows and reception in the United States
These striking new works attracted the interest of the influential New York connoisseur and art dealer Samuel Putnam Avery, famous for having introduced the paintings of Turner to America. Avery mounted Marcius-Simons' first solo exhibit of twenty works at the Avery Art Galleries in 1895. By this time, the artist's style, tone, and subject matter had changed completely from his beginnings as a light-hearted genre painter, as exemplified by the nightmarish allegory Les Courtesanes.Knauff (1895): "The Courtesans shows a frivolous crowd, gay, happy, clad in costly garments of many hues. They laugh and dance through the streets of a Grecian town, to an imposing flight of broad, marble steps, down which they wend their way, smiling, heedless, not looking ahead. But they dance to their doom. The stairway ends in a dreadful pool, the black and slimy waters of oblivion. At one side a gaping monster waits in shadow. Before us we see upturned faces, no longer filled with laughter, staring vacantly as they that float unknown, uncared for." A French critic described his works as "mystical," "strange," and "always eccentric."Bouyer, L. Raymond (1894-1895).
The 1895 Avery show was panned by some critics. The Art Interchange said the paintings "were for the most part weird fantasies of an uncontrolled imagination, wild vagaries of color, with unrelated titles…Stress has been laid on the artist's fertility of imagination, but imagination unbalanced is a doubtful gift."Anonymous (1895b). The Art Collector noted wryly that the Marcius Simons (without a hyphen) who "commenced as a painter of genre" had emerged "full fledged into Pinckney Marcius-Simons, in quite another light.…He did so, says his biographer, after 'a serious illness,' which confined him to the solitude of his studio. To judge from the results, it must have been a very serious illness indeed…"Anonymous (1895a); the quotation regarding "serious illness" appears to be from the Avery Art Galleries 1895 exhibit catalogue, which is untraced. A causal link between a critical illness and the change in Marcius-Simons' paintings is suggestive, but has not been established.
But The New York Times, noting that the exhibit had "occasioned no little discussion and comment," said that Marcius-Simons' "ideas are entirely original, extremely personal, and of a curiously symbolic nature. Little art of this order has as yet reached this city, but in Paris the Rose Croix and other exhibitions…have given the men of impressionistic ideas and methods free scope…The twenty pictures at Avery’s are exceedingly interesting…and in them are combinations of color effects entirely his own."Anonymous (1895c).
A second Avery Art Galleries show in New York, of 36 works, followed in 1896; the catalogue is available online.Marcius-Simons (1896) The New York Times wrote that "his work in these symbolic pictures is a realization of the impossible.…He has succeeded in evolving astonishingly brilliant effects of color…And above all, he is exceedingly interesting."Anonymous (1896a).
In 1897, his works appeared at Thurber's in Chicago. "Though the painter is very young," wrote The House Beautiful, "his reputation is firmly established as one of the most original and daring representatives of American art…the school of the Rose et Croix [and] all its eccentricities are willingly forgiven when one finds that it has rendered vocal the genius of such a man as Pinckney Marcius-Simons," whose works "have that strange clutch upon one's feelings that Turner's masterpieces had."Anonymous (1896b). Gabriel Mourey, on the other hand, asserted that Marcius-Simons "feebly imitates the great Turner."Mourey (1897).
When the paintings appeared in Boston, Poet-Lore declared his work "essentially modern and as supreme in its own way as any art that ever has been."Anonymous (1897), p. 318.
Sought by collectors