Under the Awning

F‌rederick Frieseke was one of the leading figures among the second generation of American expatriates in France. He first studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York before leaving for Paris in 1898 to continue his studies. There Frieseke enrolled at the Académie Julian and also at the Académie Carmen, James McNeill Whistler’s short-lived school. Whistler's passion for Japanese art, for decoration and for distinctive color arrangements had a lasting influence on Frieseke's work. By 1900 he was spending summers in Giverny and, after achieving artistic and financial success, was able to purchase a home there in 1906. He chose American Impressionist Theodore Robinson’s former house next door to Claude Monet’s. Frieseke remained in Giverny for almost two decades, where the artist colony also included Americans Theodore Butler, Willard Metcalf, Richard Miller and Guy Rose.
Frieseke's celebrated Giverny subjects of women in domestic interiors, or, such as in the present example, enjoying moments of leisure in the village's opulent gardens, are imbued with a remarkable sense of light and high-keyed palette adopted from the French Impressionists. William H. Gerdts writes, "It was Frieseke who introduced into the repertory of Giverny painting the concern for rich, decorative patterns, related to the art of Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and the other Nabi painters. There are patterns of furniture, patterns of parasols, patterns of fabric and wall coverings, patterns of light and shade, and patterns of flowers, all played off one against another in bright sunshine..." (Monet's Giverny: An Impressionist Colony, New York, 1993, p. 172). Exemplary of the artist's ornamental sensibility, Under the Awning captures the artist's wife, Sadie, whose clothing both complements and contrasts with the candy-colored fabrics and textures that frame her meditative moment.