Frederick Carl Frieseke: Afternoon at the Beach

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Afternoon at the Beach is a mural painting by Frederick Carl Frieseke, an American Impressionist who spent most of his productive years as an expatriate in France. Department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker commissioned the 15-foot-long painting for the Hotel Shelburne in Atlantic City. Frieseke designed it as a single composition in 1905, and completed it in segments in 1906. Ultimately, Afternoon at the Beach depicts elegant young ladies with bonnets, as well as several children — two of which appear on a donkey — and an occasional male enjoying a day at the beach under striped parasols.

Female figures, flowers, and domestic interiors and exteriors were recurring elements in his paintings. Their fairly close tonalities reflect the deep influence that James Abbott McNeill Whistler had on Frieseke’s style. Frieseke was born in Owosso, Michigan, in 1874, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York before moving to Paris to attend the Académie Julian and the Acadamie Carmen with Whistler.

Afternoon at the Beach is a mural painting by Frederick Carl Frieseke, an American Impressionist who spent most of his productive years as an expatriate in France. Department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker commissioned the 15-foot-long painting for the Hotel Shelburne in Atlantic City. Frieseke designed it as a single composition in 1905, and completed it in segments in 1906. Ultimately, Afternoon at the Beach depicts elegant young ladies with bonnets, as well as several children — two of which appear on a donkey — and an occasional male enjoying a day at the beach under striped parasols.

Female figures, flowers, and domestic interiors and exteriors were recurring elements in his paintings. Their fairly close tonalities reflect the deep influence that James Abbott McNeill Whistler had on Frieseke’s style. Frieseke was born in Owosso, Michigan, in 1874, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York before moving to Paris to attend the Académie Julian and the Acadamie Carmen with Whistler.

 

In 1906, he and his wife settled in the art colony in Giverny, where the great French Impressionist Claude Monet resided. Here, Frieseke found his aesthetic and asserted his familiar theme. The parasol also became a frequent motif — protecting his female models and reinforcing their position as articles of beauty and the recipient of the viewer’s gaze. Afternoon at the Beach was installed at the Hotel Shelburne in February 1906.

In 2000 and 2001, it was exhibited at the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, in the 2000-2001 exhibition Frederick Carl Frieseke; The Evolution of an American Impressionist. Frieseke exhibited extensively in the United States and in his adopted France. His work is in the permanent collections of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, and Museo d’Art Moderna de Ca’Pesaro in Venice, Italy.