Frederick Carl Frieseke: Studies Abroad

"Woman in the Light of a Window"
by Frederick Carl Freiseke

"Although Frederick Carl Frieseke had set out to be no more than a journeyman draftsman producing the line drawings that were much in demand by the publishing industry, the young man changed course, deciding to become an artist. No doubt he was encouraged by such colleagues as Lawton Parker, then in his third year at the Art Students League, as well as by the larger cultural life of New York. 

Again with backing from his father - $500 this time - in September 1897 Frieseke sailed for France on the SS Massachusetts. With him was Will Howe Foote, a lifelong friend and fellow Michigander who had also been a student at the Art Institute of Chicago. Montparnasse, an historic neighborhood on the Left Bank in Paris, was to remain his home as long as he lived in Paris. This area, very much favored by Americans, attracted the chic as well as the least affluent of the young art students who flocked to Paris - the necessary place to come, both for their education and to introduce themselves into the pecking order of a thriving art establishment whose grand old men controlled access to the academies, the salons, and all hope of advancement.

Frieseke enrolled in the Acadèmie Julian in 1897 or 1898. Sometime prior to 1901, he engaged at least the criticism, and possibly the tutelage, of the painter Auguste Delecluse, who maintained an academy in Montparnasse. In 1890 Delecluse had joined the rebellious group seceding from the Société des Artiste Français and founded a new Salon, the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. It was in the latter Salon that Frieseke, barely off the boat, exhibited three watercolors in April-May of 1899.

 During his first summer abroad, Frieseke went on a sketching trip to Holland, working exclusively in watercolor. His subject was primarily the landscape, as seen and rendered in the browns that were the academic mainstay of the period."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Frederick Carl Frieseke: A Biography by Nicholas Kilmer" in Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionist"published on the occasion of an exhibition of Frieseke's work.)   

 

Frederick Carl Frieseke: Birth

"Self-Portrait, 1938" by Frederick Carl Frieseke

"Frederick Carl Frieseke was born in 1874, one of the first generation of Friesekes born in the United States. At the time of his birth in 1874 much of the country was still wilderness, and many of its inhabitants had only recently arrived from Europe. In 1858 the artist's grandfather, Frederick Frieseke, a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo, arrived in Owosso, a small town in central Michigan. His sons Julius and Herman Carl enlisted in the Union cause, and once they had both completed their tours of duty, Herman established an operation to manufacture brick and drain tile from the local salmon-colored clay. The first paved streets in Owosso were surfaced with Frieseke brick and many of the town's buildings were made from the same material. Herman married Eva Graham of Owosso. Their first child, Edith, was born in 1871; Frederick Carl, the second, in 1874. Fred was six when his mother died.

In 1881, after his wife's death, Herman went to Jacksonville, Florida, taking the children with him. He remained there for the next four years, establishing a brick-making operation, but then went back to Michigan.The stay in Florida when Fred was at an impressionable age was to remain in his imagination, and late in his life, when he considered returning to the United States, it was toward Florida that he turned his thoughts.

He was sent to the public schools of Owosso. He drew continually but nonetheless graduated from Owosso's public high school. Although the drawings in his textbooks reveal the true course of his early talent, he was then - and continued to be - an avid reader, beginning with such rags-to-riches sagas as the Horatio Alger series and Charles Dickens' 'David Copperfield.' His course was set when, at the age of nineteen, he visited the art pavilion of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Here, in the midst of the visual riot of paintings, posters, and prints, he first recognized that there might be a living to be made with the talent for drawing he had been idly developing.

He attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago between 1893 and 1896. Having mastered some basics, and confident in his skill as a draftsman, he persuaded his father to stake him to a season in New York. With $200 in journey money he made for New York, where he enrolled in the men's afternoon life class at the Art Students League. His plan was to make his living by selling cartoon drawings to such periodicals as 'Puck,' 'Truth,' and the 'New York Times.'

'I remember I didn't much like my winter in New York,' he wrote later to his fiancée. 'I was doing jokes, and it wasn't much to joke about, trying to make a living out of them. If I had had more success, though, I should never have come abroad, never have painted, and most important of all should never have know the dearest girl in the world.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Frederick Carl Frieseke: A Biography by Nicholas Kilmer" in Frederick Carl Frieseke: The Evolution of an American Impressionist"published on the occasion of an exhibition of Frieseke's work.)   

Daniel Chester French: A Heritage of Beauty

"Death and the Young Warrior" by Daniel French

"At the age of eighty-one, Daniel French took to his bed more frequently than ever, repeatedly felled by unspecified illnesses. In September he suffered a heart attack, but stubbornly refusing to be hospitalized, remained at home to convalesce. 'Mr. French may live to a hundred, and I hope he does,' commented his neighbor, 'but when the end comes, he will be found still working, like the artist in his own beautiful piece which stands in the Metropolitan Museum called 'Death and the Sculptor.' In truth, French's working days at the studio had come to an end.

On October 6, 1931, the ailing old sculptor summoned the strength to leave his bed while a nurse changed the sheets. He used the opportunity to glance out the window to take in the splendid view that had first enthralled him four decades earlier: his long-inspiring Chesterwood realm, so rich in memories of creative accomplishment and family happiness. The next morning Daniel Chester French died - as customary with him, without further word - in his sleep.

The funeral took place on Sunday, October 11, in the flower-bedecked Chesterwood studio, with his sculptures serving as a backdrop, and several of his plaster models arranged beside his coffin. Most conspicuous of all was his beckoning angel 'The Genius of Creation,' its hands outstretched toward the bier as if in blessing. Nearby stood the large model for the enthroned Lincoln, with French's many medals and awards arrayed at its base. To another side rested an unfinished bust in clay of Daniel Webster, with the working tools just as he had left them the last day he was in the studio.

During the memorial service, Frank Stockbridge read a poem he had composed to honor his friend:

'Where the great craftsmen stand
Close to the Throne -
Ageless the Sculptor's hand,
Flawless the stone -
There shall these hands work on
For work's pure joy alone,
Find in Celestial stone
Beauty unknown.'

French's onetime model, Rosalie Miller, whose musical studies the sculptor had helped to fund, then sang two hymns, ending with Schubert's 'Rest in Peace.' Afterwards, French's ashes returned to Concord for interment at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where his 'Melvin Memorial' still stood. The gravestone was simple. Beneath a laurel wreath designed by his daughter, just four words were inscribed: 'A Heritage of Beauty.'"

(Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.) 

 

Daniel Chester French: Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor, Pt. 2

"The Angel of Death and the Sculptor" in marble
by Daniel Chester French

"Having brought the plaster version of "Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor" with him to Paris, Daniel French left it behind there to be cast in bronze. In May, the completed work went on exhibit at the Salon de Champs-Élysées, where it won a third-place medal from the jury, a rare honor for an American. 'To those who understand the undercurrents of the Parisian art world,' marveled art critic William A. Coffin, 'the significance of such an award under the circumstances is very great, for it shows that the work was thus recognized purely because of its transcendent merit.'

French had meanwhile shipped the plaster model back home to New York, where it soon stimulated an extraordinary publicity wave of its own, fueled by two separate and widely praised local exhibitions, the first at the Society of American Artists, the second at the New York Architectural League. Photographs of the model were soon 'seen in every picture store,' with sculptor Lorado Taft reporting that 'they hang in thousands of homes' and could be found 'in offices and upon the desks of men of business.' Applauded Taft: 'It is a wonderful thing, a very great privilege, to be able to talk thus to one's countrymen. - and to do it in a language so exalted, with an eloquence so sustained.'

The craze for these photos made French aware for the first time of a potentially lucrative confluence of media: sculpture and photography. One-dimensional images of his three-dimensonal works might not convey the full depth of the originals, but they could successfully 'puff' his creations and, in the bargain, earn extra money as authorized reproductions. Within months, the sculptor would copyright an official photograph of 'Death and the Sculptor,' presumably to begin marketing copies on his own. For the rest of his career, French kept a close watch on photographs of his statues, trying when he could to control the images and profit by them.

In August 1893, without the fanfare of an official public dedication, the Millmore family quietly installed the original bronze over their brother's gravesite at Forest Hills Cemetery. With the approval of the Milmore heirs, Dan French authorized four new plaster copies - one each for museums in Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Chicago, where it became a mainstay and an inspiration to both writers and musicians. One poet composed an ode, a minister wrote and published a long sermon lauding French for 'shaping death as a friend', New England composer George Whitefield Chadwick created 'a Symphonic poem,' which he debuted at the New York Philharmonic that February, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, commissioned French to  produce a marble version for their permanent collection. By depicting an artist confronting the tenuousness of life against a backdrop of eternal mystery, he had managed to suggest that great art would outlast great artists - and much more."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Monument Man: The Life & Art of Daniel Chester French" by Harold Holzer.)

 

Daniel Chester French: Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor

"Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor"
by Daniel Chester French

"Without question, the most acclaimed of French's works in the 1890s was the ambitious composition in extreme high relief formally titled 'Death Staying the Hand of the Sculptor.' This memorial to French's deceased contemporary and onetime artistic rival, Martin Milmore, was commissioned for the Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston.

French knew precisely what his subject looked like.. He had known Milmore in both Florence and Boston, though never intimately enough to consider him a close friend. Milmore had died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of thirty-eight in 1883, without ever approaching French's success.

French's original clay maquette showed an elaborately winged angel calling home a vigorous young sculptor midwork, his chisel and mallet in hand, and his knee resting on a ledge for support as he labors on a sculpture of his own. His final composition strayed little from this. It showed the angel of death hooded, her face in somber and perpetual shadow, yet somehow unthreatening, even comforting. She would appear clutching a garland of poppies, signifying both death and the bestowal of fame, leaning towards and gently touching the chisel held by the visibly startled, quintessentially modern young artist. 

As always, French conducted methodical research to get his details exactly right. In 1890, he even wrote to his childhood bird-watching companion, William Brewster, with this request: 'I have this winter to model an angel and it occurred to me...that you might help me in the study of wings. Can't you without much trouble...get me a lot of them? I should like half a dozen pairs or so of different kinds and sizes, not with a view of copying anyone particular specimen, but for the purpose of studying up on the subject.' Before long, French's studio boasted a collection of birds wings. 

He took a plaster version with him on yet another extended European trip that began in November 1891. Returning to Paris, he established a 'dear little studio" not far from the Arc de Triomphe. Here, French received compliments from guests who inspected the Milmore as it progressed, and then basked in additional praise from a hundred 'artists and otherwise" who visited  when French exhibited the finished plaster at a studio salon in January 1892.  

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial's Sculptor" by Cynthia Close for "Art & Object.")

 

Daniel Chester French: Lighting the Lincoln Memorial

"When the Lincoln Monument was finished and the statue put in place, it was found that the lighting was so bad that for those first few years it was a constant grief to the sculptor and his artist friends. If Mr. Bacon had lived, this could, of course, have been corrected, but, with the architect of the building gone, it became a serious problem.

As at first designed, the whole ceiling was of glass, the light coming from above, as it should, to light the statue properly. During the process of building, the scheme was changed and a slightly colored marble was used in place of the glass. This gave a beautiful soft glow to the interior of the great room, but, alas! it, in conjunction with the hard light coming from the blue sky in front, was fatal to the face. At certain times of the day it was well enough, but at other times the effect was distressing. It made the face lined and haggard, and the knees unduly prominent. I think at the time, Mr. French was so discouraged about it, and for a while so hopeless of any solution of the problem, that he felt that it could never look as it was intended to look."*

"Nothing could be done, of course, without the government's sanction and an appropriation from Congress. When French's initial appeals fell on deaf ears, he turned to modern technology for evidence. He had photographs made of the large model still at Chesterwood - lit perfectly by his overhead studio skylight. Then he ordered corresponding photos of the statue in Washington as it looked in the worst possible light streaming in from the visitor entrance, then he released the comparative shots to the public.

In 1927, he asked Ulysses S. Grant III, the new director of public buildings and grounds, to allow Tiffany & Co. to try designing new glass panels overhead - to no avail. Finally he turned to the Sunlike Illuminating Company to design 'not merely a bulb, but a specially made reflector with a prismatic arrangement of cobalt oxide mirrors inside' to light the statue artificially. At last Grant came around, and floodlights were finally installed on the ceiling, removing the last barrier to the perfection French had long sought for the Lincoln Memorial. He described himself as a 'happier man' after visiting Washington in the spring of 1929 and finding the illumination 'more satisfactory than I could have believed possible.'**

To be continued

(* Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.
** Excerpts from "Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial's Sculptor" by Cynthia Close for "Art & Object.")

 

 

Daniel Chester French: The Lincoln Memorial, Pt. 2

The Piccirilli brothers lifting the left 
hand of the Lincoln statue into place. 

"The Piccirilli Brothers were awarded the contract to cut the Lincoln in marble from the plaster model. The great size - it is, I believe, the largest marble statue in existence - made it necessary to build it up from twenty pieces of stone. It is a proof of the accuracy with which the copying was done that, although the pieces were cut separately and were not assembled until put together on the pedestal in the Memorial, they fit together as perfectly as if carved from one block and sawn apart.

Mr. Bacon and the young architects in his office worked for some ten years upon the plans. Once given the order it had become the absorbing object, the inspiration of his life. He took but small interest in other work, his whole mind seeming to concentrate upon the gradual evolving of this monument, as well as to the idea of abstract beauty for which it stands.

A year after its completion he died at the age of fifty-eight. His friend Dan French said of him, at the time, that it seemed as if Bacon had been created for the sole purpose of making the Lincoln Memorial; that he had achieved a reputation for monumental work when the commission was given him; that after its achievement it would have been difficult for him to go back to more commonplace work; that, his great work finished, it seemed almost part of the scheme that he should pass on.

Great honor was conferred upon him. The greatest of these, and indeed the greatest ever conferred upon an architect in America, was when the Institute of Architects presented its medal to him at a dinner which concluded the Annual Meeting of the Institute in Washington, May 18, 1923. The dinner, attended by five hundred members and guests, was held in a great marquee at the east end of the Lagoon in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and at its close there was a beautiful pageant. Bacon, attended by the President of the Institute, guests of honor, and special guests, embarked upon a barge in the Lagoon and this, escorted by the members in costume upon either bank, was rowed down to the steps of the Memorial, which was effectively illuminated for the occasion. Here President Harding awaited them, and, introduced by Chief Justice Taft, the Permanent Chairman of the Lincoln Memorial Commission, he presented to Henry Bacon, with an appropriate address, the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects - 'the highest honor within its power to give.' Mr. Cortissoz referred to Henry Bacon as 'an embodied conscience.'" 

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Memories of a Sculptor's Wife" by Mary Adams French.)