Seymour was born in
Milan, Illinois, and studied in
Cincinnati with Lewis Meakin and Vincent Nowattny, and later in Paris as well. He taught decorative illustration at the
Art Institute of Chicago, and was an artist-in-residence at
Knox College. He painted, and produced etchings, woodcuts and block prints. He was a noted designer of bookplates. For a time around the turn of the twentieth century, Seymour was associated with
L. Frank Baum, and worked on Baum's books ''
By the Candelabra's Glare (1898), Father Goose: His Book (1899), and American Fairy Tales'' (1901). Seymour illustrated or designed a range of books, often in high-quality limited editions, including
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1899),
John Keats's
The Eve of St. Agnes (1900),
John Milton's ''
Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity'' (1901),
Percy Bysshe Shelley's
A Defence of Poetry (1904), the Biblical
Book of Ruth (1904), and
William Blake's
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1906). For almost seven decades, Seymour ran his own book publishing firm in Chicago. Among the works he published were
Frank Lloyd Wright's
The Japanese Print (1912) and
Experimenting with Human Lives (1923), and
Alice Corbin's
Red Earth: Poems of New Mexico (1920). He published
Henry Blake Fuller's ''
Bertram Cope's Year'' (1919), a novel about homosexuals in Chicago and an early example of
gay literature in America. Seymour's
Alderbrink Press maintained traditions of the
Arts and Crafts Movement into the 1950s. Seymour wrote
Across the Gulf (1928), about his travels in southern Mexico — another expression of his interest in Native American cultures. He also published his own account of his life and art, in which he stated that the Chicago artists of his generation saw themselves as "peculiarly American" practitioners who disregarded "European, eastern or conventional rules for guidance in saying what they wanted to say."
Bookplates by Ralph Seymour Fletcher File:Ralph Fletcher Seymour Bookplate-Eva Leah Berman.jpg|Bookplate for Eva Leah Berman File:Ralph Fletcher Seymour Bookplate-Highland Park Library.jpg|Bookplate for the
Highland Park Public Library File:Ralph Fletcher Seymour Bookplate-Nancy Lincoln.jpg|Bookplate for Nancy Lincoln Binner File:Ralph Fletcher Seymour Bookplate-Preston A Perry.jpg|Colored bookplate for Preston A. Perry ==Death==