Dr. Symmons developed her interest in art history as a child in London where she was born and brought up. Before becoming a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art she spent a study year in Spain where she first got to know and love Spanish art, especially the art of Goya, and learned to understand the language. She has spent many vacations and sabbaticals researching in Spain and France. When she enrolled at the Courtauld Institute, she chose the 18th century as her specialist period and the 19th and 20th centuries as her specialist subjects, and they remain her specialist areas.

At the Courtauld Dr Symmons met a number of people who inspired and helped her in her work. Her tutors included Anita Brookner (the novelist) and Anthony Blunt (the spy, although no-one knew he was a spy at that time, except the intelligence services ! In those days he was Master of the Queen's Pictures); Alan Bowness (former Director of the Tate Gallery) and John Golding (painter and major Cubist scholar), and visiting lecturers like Isaiah Berlin and Robert Rosenblum.

Having graduated during the late 1960s, the decade when Britain was opening new universities and giving young people much greater access to university education, she taught at art schools in London, Bournemouth, Canterbury and Maidstone and was offered a full-time post at the University of Essex, one of the newest universities with a reputation throughout the 1970s for student revolutions and multiple sit-ins. It was a fortunate time to work at such a vibrant and modern institution and teach such questioning and enthusiastic students. Over time she has taught many who now themselves lecture in universities and work in museums, both in Britain and other countries. She has lectured at the Universities of Cambridge and London, and has given public lectures at the National Gallery in London, The Hayward Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery , and the Prado Museum in Madrid. She has also lectured and taught at the University of Georgia, Savannah College of Art and Design, USA and the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

She wrote a doctoral dissertation on the English sculptor John Flaxman, a friend of William Blake's, and still has research interests in that area of British art. She has published books and articles on 18 th and 19 th -century artists and was partly responsible for the large Flaxman exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London , the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen and the Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1979. She put on a show of Goya prints in 1999 at the University of Essex , sponsored by the Vicente Canada Blanch Foundation in Valencia , and which the Independent newspaper called the best provincial exhibition of the year.

Having completed her new edition of Goya's letters in English translation, Sarah Symmons has developed an interest in artists' letters in general and intends to follow up the Goya letters with a book of case studies of private letters of several 19th-century painters, including Delacroix, Whistler, Manet, Beardsley, Constable and van Gogh.