FREDERICK FRIESEKE, Girl Embroidering

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, at a time when most American artists living in France were returning to America, Frederick Frieseke and his young family remained in Paris.  Frieseke, who had moved abroad at the age of twenty four, wrote to his dealer William Macbeth, “You see we are all staying by the flag.  Things were sufficiently exciting with aeroplanes dropping bombs.  We are provisioned for a six month siege.  I couldn’t stand leaving Paris after the years I’ve lived here.  Seemed like running away” (Nicholas Kilmer, Frederick Carl Frieseke, The Evolution of an American Impressionist, Princeton, New Jersey, 2001, p. 35).  Frieseke volunteered to serve with the American Red Cross outside of Paris and he devoted the remainder of his time to painting which he stated was “the only relief from the sadness of it all” (Frederick Carl Frieseke, The Evolution of an American Impressionist, p. 36).  The result was a particularly imaginative and prolific period of artistic output.  With the Paris salons mostly closed, Frieseke sent a selection of paintings to the United States for exhibition, including the present work Girl Embroidering and Summer (1914, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Nicholas Kilmer writes, Frieseke “was able to put together a striking representation for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, which opened in June 1915.  Here Frieseke was awarded the gold medal for his entries, notable among them the nude Summer, painted in 1914, an especially fruitful year for him.  That season he produced a series of large, successful figure pieces, nude and clothed, single and in groups, that suggest singular energy…His 1915 presentation in San Francisco won him critical acclaim ” (Frederick Carl Frieseke, The Evolution of an American Impressionist, p. 36).

Frieseke had moved to France at the age of twenty-four.  After a brief period of study under the tutelage of Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens at the Acadèmie Julian (a rite of passage for many of his American contemporaries), he began to spend several months out of every year painting at Giverny where he purchased a home directly next to Claude Monet.  Shortly after his arrival there, Frieseke became the driving force behind a small group of expatriate painters living in the village and working in the Impressionist style.  Frieseke focused almost exclusively on painting women, often out of doors in his garden.  On occasion, however, the artist would turn indoors for inspiration and “some of his most sensitive paintings are his interiors with elegant ladies engaged in private, sometimes intimate domestic situations: in reverie, at a dressing table, mending lingerie” (William H. Gerdts, American Impressionism, New York, 1984, p. 265).

While the influence of Monet was a formidable one in Frieseke’s career, many of his compositions following the turn-of-the-century emphatically illustrate his response to the Nabis and other Post-Impressionists.  As William H. Gerdts writes, Frieseke’s style “seems to represent the more decorative direction that Impressionism was to take in the twentieth century, almost as close to Bonnard and Vuillard as to Renoir.  Repeated patterns of figural shapes, patterns on costumes, patterns on the curtains and coverings of furnishings, patterns of flowers and dappled sunlight were integral to his art” (American Impressionism, p. 266).  Girl Embroidering, painted in 1914, captures Jeanne Savoy, the artist’s frequent model, and features the hallmark tenets of the post-Impressionist style: a flattened picture plane, lively palette and decorative patterned surfaces.  The rich brocade chair, floral pink shawl, vibrant flowers and paneled walls are painted with staccato brushwork to create a lavish interior with a tapestry-like effect.