Frederick Carl Frieseke: A Giverny Aesthetic

"Rest (Femme au Sofa)" by Frederick Carl Frieseke

"Beginning in 1906 Fred and Sadie Frieseke began to spend the warmer months in Giverny, a comfortably bucolic village within easy reach of Paris. Giverny also enjoyed all the urban advantages of a well-established art colony, one that had been especially favored by Americans. During the months from April through October the surroundings were a movable feast attended by regulars such as Ernest and Mary Blumenschein, the Karl Buehrs, Theodore Butler, the A. B. Frost family, Lawton Parker, and Guy and Ethel Rose. The men fished together. There were countless musical evenings, tennis matches at the courts of the Hotel Baudy, and afternoon teas. The Friesekes took tea with the Monets. Monet and Sadie, herself an ambitious gardener, eagerly discussed the expansion of Monet's garden, and the new bridge from which his water lily garden could be enjoyed.

Alieen O'Bryan, Sadie's niece, spent the summer of 1910 in Giverny with the Friesekes and left a memoir that preserves some of her impressions from that time. 'It was not alone the desire to paint gardens that brought this group together,' she wrote. 'They wished to be rid of business and political ties, rid of petty vanities and avarice, rid of fashions and affiliations.' As a cultural model for the group and its aesthetic she suggested the works of Horace, in which were to be found 'a kind of breviary of good taste, of poetry, or practical and worldly wisdom.' 

'It was our custom to spend a great deal of the time in the garden. Sadie would usually read aloud while Fred painted. Occasionally I would get out my water colours; but more often I would pose for Fred and listen to whatever my aunt had chosen from their well-filled bookshelves. As I look back, life was very pleasant, and much of the pleasure lay in the fine aestheticism.'

An state observer, Aileen O'Bryan was surely correct in her suggestion that idealism was a significant factor in bringing and holding the group together. Appropriately, the nude figure outdoors, the symbol of this urbane community, is an Arcadian motif claiming a civilized innocence."

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.)