Frerichs

William Charles Anthony Frerichs was born in Ghent, Netherlands in 1829 and began painting at the age of 6, studied at the Royal Academy of the Hague School of Landscape Painting, and finished his schooling with a Grande Tour (Museum, np). In 1850 Frerichs sailed to New York to explore the vast opportunities he had overheard about America. While there, he occasionally graced the painters at the Hudson River School and, according to the Mint Museum of Art, “became known as the “Professor” among them.”

Frerichs began to explore parts of America many had yet to see, and his travels took him south into North Carolina. Here, Frerichs was engulfed in a sea of wilderness and nature he had not experienced in New York. Vast mountain ranges like the Great Smokies, Blue Ridge Mountains and the Apps seemed to touch his very existence and he began to sketch and paint what he saw, mixing and matching different elements of each landscape he visited. According to Cheryl Plamer, director of education at the Mint Museum of Art, “Frerichs was on of the first artists to

He is mostly known for his landscape paintings, but also dabbled in portraits and genre works. His paintings are in the “tradition of the romantics of the period and were inspired by an America which still had a natural wildness and beauty of landscape” (Stafford, np). Frerichs tried to put the most organic elements of nature into his paintings. His style was the “Old Dutch Style” of painting: heavily glazed, brushed with spurts of vivid color on somber backgrounds” (Pennington, pg. 25). Stafford goes on to describe Frerichs’ skies to “reflect the dark background and deep colors, typical of the Flemish school where he was trained,” and seemed to hold the birds themselves. The landscapes overall had “emphasis on light and the sublime relationship between humans and nature” (Sledge, np). His painting style truly reflects the romantic conceptions of the landscape’s