Frederick W. Freer (1849–1908)
Frederick W. Freer. Photograph reproduced in Frederick W. Morton, “Frederick W. Freer, Painter,” Brush and Pencil 8 (Sept. 1901).
Son of a distinguished Chicago physician who served as president of Rush Medical College, Frederick Warren Freer was encouraged to take up art after a childhood illness left him partially deaf. In 1867, his parents took Frederick and his sister Cora to Munich to study at the Royal Academy, then a popular art school for Americans. He began sending work to exhibits at the Chicago Academy of Design (predecessor of the Art Institute of Chicago) even before the family returned home, only weeks before the Great Fire of 1871. Two years later, Freer exhibited in the first Interstate Industrial Exposition art exhibition, and in 1876 he was elected to the Academy, a mark of his rising local reputation.
On a second sojourn in Europe, between 1877 and 1880, Freer associated with some of America’s leading expatriate artists, notably Frank Duveneck, an influential exponent of the Munich style, and William Merritt Chase, a pioneer of American impressionist painting. On his return to the United States, Freer settled in New York City, became active in numerous artists’ organizations, and exhibited widely. He worked in every genre of subject matter and explored a variety of media, including etching, pastel drawing, and watercolor painting; in the late 1880s, he was even in demand as a book illustrator. Following a third trip abroad, Freer taught at New York’s Art Students League. With his marriage, he began to specialize in images of women, for which his wife and their six children frequently served as models. The successful exhibition of one such work brought Freer election as an associate member of the National Academy of Design, and in 1889 he was represented in the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
Possibly to take advantage of Chicago's plentiful art opportunities, Freer returned home in 1890. Thereafter, he used the brighter colors and distinct brush strokes of impressionism in some of his figural works and painted landscapes outdoors and on site, according to impressionist practice. Freer was a beloved instructor at the Art Institute where he began teaching in 1892. Busy with local portrait commissions, he continued to exhibit nationally and to serve on juries, including the national art jury for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. At the world’s fair, he won a medal, one of several honors from exhibitions at the National Academy, the Art Institute, and other venues. Freer was among a handful of artists of his generation who maintained a national presence while living in Chicago: “One Of Chicago’s Own Boys—He Was Born Here and His Pictures Are Known the World Over,” trumpeted the Chicago Evening Post in 1891.[i] The artist’s successful career was capped by a retrospective show presented at the Art Institute in early 1906, two years before his death at age fifty-eight.
[i] “Paints Sweet Faces,” Chicago Evening Post clipping from circa Jan. 18, 1891, in AIC Scrapbooks, v. 5, p. 27.
Frederick W. Freer, Baby [The Young Mother], 1896
Oil on canvas, 31 by 46 inches
![Frederick W. Freer, Baby [The Young Mother], 1896](http://schwartzcollection.com/sites/default/files/styles/artwork_zoom/public/artwork/IMG_0485.jpg)
The young woman in Frederick W. Freer’s painting holds her baby up close to her cheek in a gesture of mingled tenderness and maternal pride. Both figures’ loose, voluminous clothing, the soft bedding visible just behind them, and the cool daylight flooding in from the left all suggest early morning and the first familial embrace of a new day. The immediacy of the subjects’ direct gaze further personalizes this intimate image, at once an icon of maternity and a portrait of specific individuals.
Baby is one of many paintings of mothers and children for which Freer was widely noted by the time he resettled permanently in his hometown of Chicago, in 1890. His perennial model was his wife, fellow artist Margaret Keenan. Following the birth of the first of their six children in 1888, mother-and-child images became a mainstay of his work. In June 1896, the Chicago Post reported, “Among the unfinished canvases [in Freer’s studio] is one to be completed this summer of a fair and gracious lady, richly robed, holding a beautiful child against her cheek. It holds a promise of peachy tints and high, joyous key. It should be called ‘The Flower and the Bud.’”[i] Instead, it was titled Baby in the inaugural annual exhibition of the Society of Western Artists at the Art Institute of Chicago, the first stop on the show’s tour of six midwestern cities. The painting also appeared in the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha in 1898 and the Boston Art Club’s annual exhibition the following year. With the title The Young Mother, it was reproduced in periodicals in 1900 and 1903, making it among Freer’s best-known images in the mother-and-child genre.
Freer pursued this theme in an era of new attitudes toward child-rearing, as the sentimental Victorian cult of motherhood dovetailed with growing recognition of the importance of maternal nurturing on a child’s development. His painting struck a contemporary note in its emphasis on the physical intimacy between mother and child. It was also notably modern in style and technique in its open brushwork and bright highlights, hallmarks of the modified impressionism America’s progressive painters adopted in the 1890s. Freer’s use of an almost-dry brush, his distinct paint strokes, and his slightly blurred rendering of the faces all mimic the effects of pastel, a medium favored by the impressionists; indeed, Freer was reportedly experimenting in pastel at just the time he was completing Baby.
[i] “Art and Artists,” Chicago Post, June 27, 1896.