Marie Zimmermann

Marie Zimmermann (June 17, 1879 – June 17, 1972) was an American designer and maker of jewelry and metalwork. She is noted for fine craftsmanship and innovative design in a variety of different mediums and styles. Calling herself "a craftsman" rather than an artist, she employed a range of crafts in her work, including metalsmithing, carving, painting, and sculpting. A 1926 article in the Brooklyn Eagle by Harriette Ashbrook called her "perhaps the most versatile artist in the country".

Early life and education Zimmermann was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1879, the fourth of five children to well-off Swiss immigrants John and Marie Zimmermann. Her family purchased a farm in 1882 along the Delaware River near Milford, Pennsylvania, to serve as a weekend and summer home. The family farm strongly influenced Zimmermann's creativity.

Career Over 25 years, Zimmermann worked ten to twelve hours a day to master all of the different crafts she wanted to use in her art. By 1910, Zimmerman had commissions from around the country and opened her own studio in the National Arts Club in New York. At the age of 33, she designed a large family vacation home in Pike County that shows the rustic elegance of the Arts and Crafts movement and is now a historic site.

Many of Zimmermann's pieces were both useful and decorative—one example, a candlestick with an electric light in the back, combined elegance with utility. The electric light would provide enough illumination for people to see, and the candles would provide atmosphere. Zimmermann used many of her own pieces in her own home and therefore knew the work from the client/user's perspective as well as the maker/designer's. She eventually left New York City to settle on the family farm.

Works by Marie Zimmermann were collected by the Columbus Museum (the Persian Box, in silver and ivory with applied lapis lazuli, pearls, jade and malachite), the Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Wolfsonian-FIU. Her papers are held at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.

The Marie Zimmermann Farm was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.