Edward Cucuel was a painter of genre landscapes, nudes and portraits, but it is for his paintings of young women with both lakes and landscapes as a backdrop that he is renowned.

Cucuel was born in San Francisco in 1875, the son of an Englishman, a newspaper publisher and a French mother.

Cucuel studied at the School of Art in San Francisco, also working as an illustrator for The Examiner in the city. In 1893 he travelled to Paris where he studied at the Academy Julian, the Academy Colarossi and the Academy des Beaux Arts under Jean-Léon Gérôme.

In 1896 Cucuel returned to the United States, to New York, where he worked as an illustrator. He subsequently returned to Europe, to Germany and Italy to study the Old Masters. He exhibited in Düsseldorf in 1902. In 1904 Cucuel exhibited in Berlin and embarked on travels which included Spain, Algeria, Ceylon, China and Japan.

Returning to Germany in 1907 he worked in Berlin, again as an illustrator, moving to Munich the same year. Here he joined the Die Schollem, of which Leo Putz (1869-1940) was the President, a group of painters working in a looser, decorative more carefree style. Cucuel painted with Leo Putz, many of his works being set in Chiemsee or Lake Starnberg just to the South of Munich.

Cucuel, like Putz, exhibited at the Munich Secession and in Paris in 1912.

In 1913 he married Clara Lotte von Marcard (c.1915-1955) and continued to live and work in Germany. In 1921 Cucuel held an exhibition of his work in New York, and the following year at the Grosvenor Gallery in London.

In 1939 he returned to the United States and settled in Pasadena California.

His works can be found in museums in: Liverpool; Chicago; Detroit; New York; Pittsburgh and Toronto.