Edwards was educated in Antwerp and Paris; he was essentially self taught as an artist. He began his career in publishing at Harper Bothers under Charles Parsons and later illustrated books for the Century Company. Following his marriage in 1888, he and his wife traveled in Europe before going to to Cancale in Brittany where he studied art under Eugene Feyen.
Back in America Edwards returned to his essential career, which was in publishing and illustration. From 1893 to 1903 he was art director of Collier's Magazine, and from 1904 to 1912 held the post of manager of the art department of the American Bank Note Company. However, he sustained a parallel career as an author and illustrator of travel books, and painter of portraits, murals, and scenes form his European travels. Between the publication in 1886 of his Thumbnail Sketches and the publication in 1919 of The Jackdaw of Rheims Edwards produced numerous books on Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain and Turkey among other places. Among his portraits were those of President Warren G. Harding, and a president of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal.
In 1915 an exhibition of architectural renderings of buildings in various Belgian cities Edwards had made in the autumn of 1910 was presented at Arthur H. Hahlo & Co. In obvious reference to the German invasion of the previous year, the exhibition was titled "The Belgium That Was." An exhibition of twenty-four of his gouaches, predominantly views of Spain and Turkey, were shown by the Junior League of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1947.
Highly regarded for his renderings of historic buildings destroyed during the First World War, he was honored by a number of foreign governments. Edwards cousin, the painter Catharine Wharton Morris Wright, in her 1957 autobiography The Color of Life, noted his honors as he listed them on his visiting card:
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, France; Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Couronne, Belge; Chevalier de l'Ordon Real d'isabel, Spain; Officier de l'Instruction Publique, France; and Palmes d'Or, Ministere des Beaux-Arts, France. He also listed a selection of the organizations of which he was a member: American Water Color Society; Society of Illustrators; National Arts Club; and National Institute of Arts and Letters.
