- Pierre Edouard Frere
Pierre Edouard Frère (1819-1886), French painter, studied under
Hippolyte Delaroche , entered the école des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder atJohn Ruskin 's enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frere's work the depth ofWilliam Wordsworth , the grace ofJoshua Reynolds , and the holiness ofFra Angelico . What we can admire in his work is his accomplished craftsmanship and the intimacy and tender homeliness of his conception. Among his chief works are the two paintings, "Going to School" and "Coming from School", "The Little Glutton" (his first exhibited picture) and "L'Exercice" (in the 19th century this work was inJohn Jacob Astor 's collection). A journey toEgypt in 1860 resulted in a small series of Orientalist subjects, but the majority of Frere's paintings deal with the life of the kitchen, the workshop, the dwellings of the humble, and mainly with the pleasures and little troubles of the young, which the artist brings before us with humor and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.References
*1911
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