Edith Maryon was the second of six children. Her parents were John Maryon Simeon and his wife Louisa Church who lived in London where she grew up. She attended a girls school and later went to a boarding school in the Swiss city of Geneva. During the 1890s she studied sculpture in London at the Central School of Design, and from 1896 at the Royal College of Arts. She exhibited at the Royal Academy. Her works of that period showed her leaning toward the subject of Christianity, such as a model of Michael, the relief The Seeker of Divine Wisdom and The Cross of Golgotha.[2]
Maryon met Rudolf Steiner in 1912/13 and after the summer of 1914 she moved to Dornach. She worked with Steiner on the construction of the first Goetheanum, and with him on the modelling and carving of the wooden sculpture The Representative of Humanity. Steiner designed the nine-metre high sculpture to be placed in the first Goetheanum. Now on permanent display at the second Goetheanum, it shows a central, free-standing Christ holding a balance between the beings of Lucifer and Ahriman, representing opposing tendencies of expansion and contraction.[3][4] The sculpture was intended to present, in contrast to Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Christ as mute and impersonal such that the beings that approach him must judge themselves.[5]
At a foundation meeting held during Christmas 1923 Steiner nominated Maryon as leader of the Section for the Plastic Arts at the Goetheanum[6][1] (or Sculptural Arts)[7] (German Sektion für Bildende Künste).[8] The following May, she died of tuberculosis.
^The Representative of Humanity Between Lucifer and Ahriman, von Halle and Wilkes (2010) ISBN9781855842397
^The Representative of Humanity Between Lucifer and Ahriman, The Wooden Model at the Goetheanum, Judith von Halle, John Wilkes (2010) ISBN9781855842397 from the German Die Holzplastik des Goetheanum (2008)[1]Archived 2 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine
^Rudolf Steiner Christ in Relation to Lucifer and Ahriman, lecture May, 1915 [2]
^Rudolf Steiner, The Etheric Body as a Reflexion of the Universe lecture, June 1915 [3]
^Rudolf Steiner, Constitution of the School of Spiritual Science: Its arrangement in Sections 1964, republished 2013, p. 22. ISBN9781855843820
^Record of Foundation meeting 1923, session of 28 December, 10 a.m. ISBN0880101938[4]
^Currently known as "fine arts" or "visual arts": Bildende,[5]
fine,[6] visual [7]
Further reading
Rembert Biemond, Edith Maryon, in Anthroposophy in the 20th Century: e. Kulturimpuls in biographical portraits. Edited by Bodo von Plato. Dornach: Verlag am Goetheanum, 2003. ISBN3-7235-1199-6
Rex Raab, Edith Maryon, Sculptor and Associate of Rudolf Steiner, a biography [...]. Dornach: Philosophisch-anthroposophical Verlag am Goetheanum, 1993. ISBN3-7235-0648-8
Selg, Peter (2022). Edith Maryon: Rudolf Steiner and the Sculpture of Christ in Dornach. Translated by Barton, Matthew. Forest Row: Temple Lodge Publishing. ISBN978-1-912230-95-2.
