"Springt Scattering Stars" by Edwin Blashfield. 1927. Oil on canvas. 130 cm × 110 cm. (Private collection)

Edwin Blashfield was born in Brooklyn in 1848 to William H. Blashfield and Eliza Dodd.

He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after initially studying engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He moved to Europe in 1867 to study with Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat in Paris and remained abroad until 1881, traveling, painting, and exhibiting his work at Salon exhibitions.

Following his early success as a genre painter, Blashfield became a widely known muralist, whose works adorned the dome of the Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, several state capitals, and the central dome of the Library of Congress.

Blashfield was a member of numerous arts organizations, including the National Academy of Design, the National Society of Muralists, of which he served as president from 1909 to 1914, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Blashfield was awarded the National Academy of Design's Gold Medal in 1934, became an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from New York University in 1926. He served on the Commission of Fine Arts from 1912 to 1916.

He married Evangeline Wilbur in 1881, and together they wrote Italian Cities (1900) and translated Vasari's Lives of the Artists (4 vols., 1897).

Blashfield died in 1936 at his summer home on Cape Cod and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York.