The size of the image is 9 3/8" x 6 1/2"
The size of the paper is 16" x 11 1/2"
Freer's preferred subjects in his paintings were intimate interiors with
a mother and child, using his own wife and children as models, but he
also painted landscapes. Freer returned to the USA in 1880, living in
New York until 1890 when he returned to Chicago to become President of
the Chicago Academy of Design. He was Well-respected in his own day. He died in Chicago in 1908.
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. source: schwartzcollection