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.)