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signed F.C. Frieseke, l.l.

oil on canvas

Painted circa 1912.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Frieseke's work being compiled by Nicholas Kilmer, the artist's grandson, and sponsored by Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York.
PROVENANCE

Macbeth Gallery, New York, January 1913
Charles and Elizabeth Wallace, Stowe, Vermont (acquired from the above)
By descent to the present owner
EXHIBITED

New York, Berry-Hill Galleries, Frederick C. Frieseke: Women in Repose, May-June 1990, no. 18, illustrated in color p. 32
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

"The Paintings of F.C. Frieseke," The International Studio, October 1914, illustrated p. 263
CATALOGUE NOTE

Frederick Frieseke left the United States at the age of twenty-four to study in Paris, away from what he considered the "puritanical restrictions prevailing in America" that interfered with his artistic sense of freedom. After a brief period of study under the tutelage of Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens at Académie Julian, he began to spend several months out of every year painting at Giverny. By 1900, Frieseke had established himself in this small village south of Paris and 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, like many of his contemporaries, 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). In Coral Earring, painted circa 1912, Frieseke employs the flattened picture plane, bold color palette and richly patterned surfaces favored by the post-Impressionists. The kaleidoscopic background, striped table cloth and vibrant flowers painted with thick impasto create a tapestry-like effect which is juxtaposed with the delicate rendering of the central figure.