Frederick Carl Frieseke

An expatriate living in France for much of his career, Frederick Carl Frieseke was well known for his richly colored and vividly patterned paintings of women in gracious interiors and flower-filled gardens. The son of a German immigrant brick manufacturer, Frieseke was born in Owosso, Michigan, but was raised partly in Jacksonville, Florida. A visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 encouraged his interest in becoming an artist, and he studied first at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1897, Frieseke departed for Paris to pursue his studies.

Like many aspiring artists, Frieseke enrolled first at the Académie Julian and devoted his free time to making watercolor drawings of scenes in Paris and in picturesque spots in rural France and Holland. At the Académie Carmen, a school established by the influential American artist James McNeill Whistler, sculptor and painter Frederick MacMonnies encouraged Frieseke to paint in oils. Beginning in 1899, he exhibited his landscapes and figural works at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, the more avant-garde of the two existing Parisian salons, or regular exhibitions. During his early years in France, Frieseke supported himself by making illustrations and mural decorations for commercial buildings owned by Philadelphia department store magnate John Wanamaker. Such work brought him back to the United States on regular return visits, but he remained a lifelong expatriate in France.

In 1901, Frieseke began to specialize in paintings of domestic scenes, gardens, and female nudes. Four years later, he first visited the Normandy village of Giverny, where MacMonnies and his artist-wife Mary Fairchild MacMonnies were prominent members of a thriving artists’ colony. In 1906, he returned with his bride, Sarah O’Bryan Freiseke, whom he married in the autumn of 1905; they returned every summer through 1919. Gradually embracing the techniques of painting in spots and lines of pure color embraced by many of the artists associated with Giverny, Frieseke portrayed his wife and later also his daughter at leisure in bright boudoirs and blossoming gardens, and professional models posed nude in bed or outdoors on sun-dappled grass. In these works he experimented  in the use of relative color values arranged for pleasing formal effect. The style he perfected, often referred to as “decorative impressionism,” synthesized traditional impressionist concern for sunlight and atmosphere and the decorative and highly patterned style of the artists’ group known as Les Nabis (“the prophets”), in which color and pattern were used expressively rather than naturalistically. From the beginning, Frieseke’s paintings won critical approval and awards on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1915, for example, he received the grand prize at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

Unlike many American expatriates, the Friesekes remained in France during World War I, but in 1920 they left Giverny after purchasing a farm in the Normandy village of Le Mesnil-sur-Blangy, located not far from Deauville. Frieseke now focused on the female figure, especially the nude, posed indoors but in natural light. Moving beyond decorative impressionism, he incorporated historical and contemporary sources as he developed a more modern approach. His palette became darker, and his surface patterns grew more restrained. In 1923, he joined with other artists to found the Salon de Tuileries, a progressive exhibiting organization in Paris. Around this time, he renewed his interest in watercolor, especially during winter visits to Nice, in the south of France, and a two-year stay in Switzerland, in 1930–32. Having turned to portraiture in his final years, Frieseke died at home in France at the age of sixty-five.