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William Charles Anthony Frerichs

William Karel Anthonius Frerichs (he was to Anglicize his names later upon moving to the United States) was born in Ghent, then part of The Netherlands, on March 2, 1829. From the ages of six through fourteen, he attended the Royal Academy at The Hague, studying art as part of his regular curriculum with Andreas Schelfhout and Bartholomeus J. van Hove, two forerunners of the "Hague School." For the next three years he attended the University of Leyden in preparation for a medical career, but he returned to the art school at The Hague in 1846, graduating with honors the following year. From 1847 to 1849, he continued his professional art training at the Royal Academy of Brussels, and then spent a year traveling in Europe, until Major August Davasae, the American Charge d' Affaires at The Hague, suggested that Frerichs begin his career in the United States and provided him with letters of introduction to that end.

Thus, in 1850 Frerichs arrived in New York, fully trained as an artist in the Dutch tradition. For four years, he live in Manhattan, exhibiting once at the National Academy of Design in 1877, the same year he was elected to the New York Sketch Club (thereby demonstrating an affiliation with the Hudson River School landscape painters). In 1854, he married and accepted a teaching post as Professor of Arts and Languages at Greensboro Female College (now Greensboro College) in North Carolina, a post he assumed in 1855.

While portraits were among Frerichs' earliest recorded paintings, he soon discovered an untapped trove of landscape subjects in the North Carolina Mountains. Despite the difficulties of access and occasional thefts by Indians of his paintings and supplies, Frerichs thus became the first painter to explore and give pictorial definition to the gorges, waterfalls, and foliage of the Blue Ridge around the French Broad and the Sauratown Range. His early preference, particularly, for waterfall scenery, while comparable to the interests of Thomas Cole and John F. Kensett, also reflects Frerichs knowledge of Ruisdael and other Dutch masters of the seventeenth century.

In 1863, Greensboro College was destroyed by fire, and along with it, Frerichs' entire art collection. He was then invited to teach at Edgewood Seminary and, when the seminary was taken over as a hospital for Confederate troops, at Quaker College in New Garden, North Carolina. While at New Garden, he was appointed to special duty as an artist with a Confederate corps of engineers inspecting the iron mines and works of the Sauratown range. After being taken, prisoner-and released-three times, Frerichs decided to evacuate himself and his family to the North. They arrived ill and penniless in New York in the late winter of 1865.

From 1865 to 1869, Frerichs maintained a studio in Manhattan, while living first in Jersey City and then in Morrisania. They then moved to Tottenville, on Staten Island, where they became neighbors of Jasper Cropsey, William Page and Christopher P. Cranch. Frerichs continued traveling in search of landscape subjects, for his paintings record he features of the Connecticut River Valley, the White fountains of New Hampshire, the Hudson River, and even Quebec. He also painted marines, animal (especially cattle) subjects, and winter skating scenes, in all three strongly reflecting his Dutch precedents and training.

In 1880, Frerichs moved with his second wife (his first had lied in 1814) to Newark, New Jersey, where he was to remain a resident for twenty years. In 1900, he returned to Tottenville to live with his eldest son, although he maintained a mailing address in Newark until 1902. He died in Tottenville on March 16, 1905.

Literature:
Art And Artists of the South, Bruce W. Chambers, Ph.D.

Exhibitions:
"A Retrospective Exhibition", North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, N.C., 1974

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton

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