Born in San Francisco in 1875, Edward Cucuel spent much of his life as an expatriate, learning from the leading French and German academicians of the era. Despite, or perhaps because of, his penchant for travel, he established a strong international reputation and a successful career in Europe as well as the United States.

At the age of fourteen, he enrolled at the School of Design in San Francisco, and three years later, in 1892, he went to Paris and studied at the Académie Julien. In 1893, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts as a student of Jean-Leon Gerome. In 1896, he returned to the United States and worked as an illustrator on the San Francisco Call and Examiner newspapers and earned enough money to return to Germany and Paris, which he did in the next few years.

In 1907, having lived much of the time in Germany, he moved his studio from Berlin to Munich and was much influenced there by the German Expressionists. He began working with Leo Putz and developed his own Impressionist style, characterized by a palette of warm pastels and the brilliant use of thick impasto.

He married Clara Lotte von Marcard in 1913, and they spent their summers in a villa on Lake Amersee in Holzhausen near Munich. In 1928, he moved to New York, but traveled extensively, and in 1939, he settled permanently in California. He died in Pasadena in 1954.

His works can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago; Detroit Institute of Arts; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; National Academy Museum, New York; and Art Museum at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, among other notable institutions.