Frederick Carl Frieseke

Estate of the artist, 1939
Frances Frieseke Kilmer (his daughter)
Mr. and Mrs. Sheldon Keck, 1966
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1968 (as Women with Parasols (Pollard Willows)
Nancy Wood Holmes, Lansing, Michigan, circa 1960s (acquired from the above)
Private collection, East Lansing, Michigan (acquired from the estate of the above)
By descent to the present owner 

The canvas is wax lined with metal strips attached around the edges. There is some slight frame abrasion near the lower left edge Under UV: there is a 5-inch vertical line of inpainting in the lower center, otherwise fine.
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Frederic Carl Frieseke was born in Owosso, Michigan in 1874 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York.  In 1898, he traveled to France to continue his studies and remained there for the duration of his career. Frieseke settled in the bucolic town of Giverny following a summer spent there in 1900. He was immediately enamored by the idyllic landscape, which offered a seemingly endless source of inspiration for him and other expatriate Impressionist artists. By 1906 the artist had moved into the former house of fellow American painter Theodore Robinson, who lived next to Claude Monet, the patriarch of the Giverny artist colony. Monet’s famed lush and intricate garden had a significant impact on Frieseke, whose home also had a beautiful garden that served as subject matter for many of his compositions. Aileen O’Bryan, Frieseke’s niece, eloquently described the majesty and variety of the garden, “I can close my eyes now and see them against the tall spikes of delphinium and the big pink roses. Around them were clumps of sweet William and daisies, yellow and white; there were marigold, calendula, campanula, and snapdragon. The poppies and lilies were through blooming; but the hollyhocks, shading from pale yellow through deep scarlet, made a tapestry of radian colors” (as quoted in Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionist,  p. 87).

Painted by 1908, En Promenade captures the vitality of the French landscape and depicts one of Frieseke’s favored compositions – elegantly dressed women at leisure in his garden. He uses Impressionistic brushstrokes paired with color and pattern to infuse the composition with delicate rays of light that settle on the grass and the women’s parasol. Frieseke’s interest in the effects of sunlight began in Giverny and remained with him throughout his career. The artist elaborated on this in a 1914 interview, "It is sunshine, flowers in sunshine, girls in sunshine, the nude in sunshine, which I have principally been interested in for eight years and if I could only reproduce it exactly as I see I would be satisfied... If you are looking at a mass of flowers in the sunlight out of doors you see sparkle of spots of different colors; then paint them in that way... The effect of impressionism in general has been to open the eyes of the public to see not only the sun and light, but the realization that there are new truths in nature" (as quoted in C.T. MacChesney, "Frieseke Tells Some Secrets of His Art," The New York Times, June 7, 1914).