Details are few to describe the life and career of Gardner Symons.
The son of German immigrants whose surname was Simon, he reported his first artistic training to have been at the Art Institute of Chicago, yet there is no record of his attendance at that institution. Symons lived in Europe for almost a decade, studying in Paris, Munich and London. In 1896 he was in the United States, for he toured California with the painter William Wendt in that year. In 1899 he exhibited at the London's Royal Academy, and around that time he began painting at the artist's colony at St. Ives, Cornwall, and using a plein airist technique for his landscapes and marines. Walter Elmer Schofield arrived in St. Ives in 1902, and the two artists's work bore a marked affinity thereafter.
Although contemporary biographical sketches on him repeatedly say he returned to America in 1909, he acquired a studio in Laguna Beach, California, in 1906, which he maintained at least on a part-time basis to 1915. He became identified with the California School which also included, among others, Edgar Payne, Armin Hansen, and William Wendt. However, Symons worked primarily on the East coast. While he visited Europe frequently, his time in the United States was divided between New York and Colerain, Massachusetts, where the snow scenes that became his speciality were sited.
Symons first major success was his winning of the Academy's Carnegie Prize in the winter exhibition of 1909; the prize-winning painting, An Opalescent River, was promptly acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A number of major awards followed in the next several years; at the Academy he received a Saltus Medal in 1913, and Altman prize in 1922. His expansive landscape compositions had much in common with those of Schofield and Edward Redfield. Their viewpoint often provided a panoramic sweep of scenery; colors were bright and vigorously brushed, and the resulting effect tend to impose a decorative pattern on descriptive landscape features.
Symons served on the Academy Council from 1923 to 1926. Four years later when he died after a long illness, the Council remembered him especially as "first and foremost a student of nature. All his canvasses, even those of very large dimensions, were produced in the open." Symons's widow, Zara, later married the painter, Louis Betts.
