He was born on the 17th of April 1874 in Owosso, Michigan and was initially a cartoonist but in 1893, Frieseke decided to be become a painter and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1897, Frieseke arrived in Paris to further his art education and worked in the atelier of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens at the Académie Julian. He also received tutoring from Auguste-Joseph Delecluse and studied very briefly in James McNeill Whistler’s Académie Carmen. Whistler’s influence on Frieseke’s developing style was obvious as Frieseke absorbed the great master’s appreciation for the‘infinite gradation’ of colour that was possible through paint. The flattened space and flowing line of the Art Nouveau style significantly influence Frieseke in this formative period of his career.

Frieseke moved to Giverny in 1906 and moved into a two-story cottage next door to Claude Monet and began to focus on painting women in colourful garden settings. He drew figures solidly but rendered the surroundings in which he placed his models with the broken brushwork of Impressionism. Frieseke’s palette during his Giverny period primarily consisted of greens, blues and violets, golds, vivid oranges, and whites, which capture and reflect the brilliant summer sunlight. In 1920 Frieseke began creating of a large group of canvases representing frontally posed female figures. Frieseke’s palette is now darker than that of his early Giverny period and shows more interest in the qualities of chiaroscuro as he explored less brilliant light effects. Works painted after 1920 show a great deal of control on Frieseke’s part, which when combined with the deeper palette, contribute to a sense of psychological awareness and intensity.

Frieseke exhibited extensively both in the United States and France and earned medals from the St. Louis Exposition of 1904; the Temple Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1913; a prize at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915; and the William A. Clark Award from the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1935. Frieseke died on August 28, 1939 just a few months after a major retrospective of his work opened at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City.