Frederick Carl Frieseke (American, 1874-1939)

Landscape, Le Pouldu, Brittany
Signed and dated "F.C. Frieseke-1901-" l.r., titled on an exhibition label from the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (see below), affixed to the frame backing.
Watercolor on paper, sight size 23 1/4 x 18 ? in. (59.0 x 46.3 cm), framed.
Condition: Lined with a fine supporting sheet, hinged to back mat near upper corners on the reverse of the supporting sheet, deckled upper and lower edges, small losses to some deckles, scattered nicks and small losses to edges, possible repaired tears l.l. and u.r.

Exhibitions: Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionist, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, March 20-June 3, 2001, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, June 23-August 19, 2001, San Diego Museum of Art, September 8-November 11, 2001, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, December 8, 2001-February 2, 2002, exhibition catalogue no. 7, p. 132 (illustrated).

N.B. Frederick Carl Frieseke set sail for Europe in 1897 and promptly enrolled at the two favorite art schools of the American expatriate community in Parisùthe Acad?mie Julian and the Acad?mie Carmen. The latter was a short-lived endeavor of the mercurial American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Whistler's distinctively tonalist palette, flattened picture plane, and thin paint application influenced the early works of Frieseke and several of his classmates, many of whom spent the summer of 1901 in the Breton fishing village of Le Pouldu. Frieseke devoted that summer to painting landscapes, often in watercolor, like this enchanting, somewhat mysterious scene, which he described in a letter to his future wife, Sarah O'Bryan, "I have nearly finished a watercolor which is about the best I have ever done. It's several great tall trees with a white marble urn and a bit of wall and some little figures of women in old time dresses"1

1. July 14, 1901, Frieseke Family Papers, as quoted in Nicholas Kilmer, et al, Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionist (Savannah and Princeton: Telfair Museum of Art/Princeton UP, 2001), exh. cat., p. 21.

Framed dimensions: 32 ? x 27 ? x 2 in.

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