Prompted by his desire to push light and color intensity, Frieseke explored several locations along the Seine, visiting Giverny in August 1905. Set along the valley and a patchwork of small fields, the quaint village was an escape from an encroaching modern world, its atmospheric microclimate infused with hues of iridescent color. Frieseke arrived with his wife Sadie to settle in Giverny the following summer in 1906. They took possession of Theodore Robinson’s former home, which shared a fence with Monet’s beloved Clos Normand and its carefully cultivated gardens. Monet, the overarching deity, struck a mythic presence among the American community and was, according to Guy Rose, “the chief object of interest…(who) always looked foreboding. Yet among us all, we kept track of what he was doing.” (Guy Rose, “At Giverny,” Pratt Institute Monthly 6, December 1897). Frieseke never thought of Monet as anything but an equal. He and his wife Sadie were intensely respectful of Monet’s privacy. They spoke fluent French and maintained an uncomplicated relationship with the artist. Indeed, accounts of Frieseke’s appreciation for Impressionism were limited to Renoir, who, by example, enticed him to use paint sparingly on clean, primed canvas. Truthfully, Frieseke was keenly fascinated with Monet’s optical acuity and the assertive structuring of his canvases.

Monet’s Le Mont Riboudet à Rouen au Printemps was painted in 1872 before the Impressionists had won the grudging acceptance of a few sympathetic critics. At that time, the technical aberrations or eccentricities of Frieseke’s Hill at Giverny, with its vigorous ‘unnatural’ colors and sketchy brushwork, could only have been validated if one accepted the premise of capturing a momentary effect of light. Frieseke, of course, faced none of the contentious opposition Monet did. But the two paintings resonate with the palpable feeling of conveying the moment with spontaneous immediacy that is accurate, yet poetic. The colors are unblended in either case and the hillside, with its communal fields of grain, is a patchwork of color that suggests a modern approach. Conversely, both paintings stake a claim for the ascendency of the artist as an interpreter of nature and share an agrarian or pastoral setting as well as a thematic link to artists such as Julies Bastien-Lapage, one of several painters associated with the naturalist or realist movement.