Pierre Edouard Frere - Encyclopedia

GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES

PIERRE EDOUARD FRERE (1819-1886), French painter, studied under Delaroche, entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and exhibited first at the Salon in 1843. The marked sentimental tendency of his art makes us wonder at Ruskin's enthusiastic eulogy which finds in Frere's work "the depth of Wordsworth, the grace of Reynolds, and the holiness of 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" (Mr Astor's collection). A journey to Egypt 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 humour and sympathy. He was one of the most popular painters of domestic genre in the middle of the 19th century.