Spicer-Simson's parents were on a wedding trip in France when the Franco-Prussian War began and they were unable to return to their native England for some time. Thus, the future sculptor began his life on foreign soil.
The sculptor received his early education in England, France and Germany and spent five years of his youth in Tasmania where his father operated a sheep farm. In Paris between 1888 and 1894, he studied at the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and the Academie Julian and worked in the ateliers of Colarossi, Jean Carriere, Aim‚ Millet and Jean Dampt. After his marriage in 1896 to Margaret Schmidt, an American art student, he took a position as a designer for Gorham & Company in Providence, Rhode Island, and worked as a free-lance artist. In 1899, he and his wife returned to Paris, opened a studio which the sculptor maintained until 1930, and became friends with many of the writers and artists living and working in the city. He and his wife traveled a great deal, both on the Continent and in the United States. After World War II, they settled in Miami, Florida.
Spicer-Simson is best known for his portrait work, especially that in medallion form, having created over three-hundred works of that design. Among his subjects from the art and literary worlds were Bryson Burroughs (1906), Lyonel Feininger (1927), and Virgil Barker (1948). He also produced a large number of portraits of writers and in 1924 he collaborated with Stuart P. Sherman on the publication of Men of Letters of the British Isles: Portrait Medallions From the Life which contained essays on twenty-nine writers, illustrated with portraits by Spicer-Simson. Today, the largest collection of Spicer-Simson's medallion portraits is at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida.
The sculptor exhibited at the Academy only sporadically. Among the works shown were both the first sculpture he executed in the United States, a bust of Charles Francis Adams (Massachusetts Historical Society) which was exhibited at the Academy in the winter of 1915 (cat. no. 19), and the last work of his career, a bust of the poet Robert Frost which was shown at the Academy in the spring of 1954 (cat. no. 42).
