In the Garden, Giverny

Born in Michigan, Frieseke first studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and then the Art Students League of New York before moving to Paris in 1897. While studying with several academic painters at the Academie Julian, he adopted an Impressionist style then popular with American expatriate artists. Many of them congregated in Giverny, the village northwest of Paris where their hero Claude Monet had lived since 1883. Frieseke spent his first summer in Giverny in 1905 and the following year moved into a cottage adjoining Monet's property where he continued to summer until 1920.
In Giverny Frieseke began to create luminous paintings depciting both interiors and outdoor garden scenes. In this painting he has indulged his interest in overall patterning, using his Giverny period palette of greens, blues, and violets. The application of even daps of paint gives the impression of brilliant sunlight on a bright summer day. While in many of his paintings Frieseke places a large, solidly rendered figure in the center of the composition, here a smaller figure in the middle ground merges with the overall pattern of the flowers and foliage.