Frederick Rondel

Frederick Rondel is best remembered as Winslow Homer’s only art teacher, though he was also an accomplished landscape and marine painter. Originally from Paris, he worked extensively in New England and as far west as San Francisco, producing views of the Hudson River, New England scenery, and New York City. Rondel belonged to a lineage of French painters, having studied in Paris under Théodore Gudin and Auguste Jugelet, the latter himself a pupil of Gudin.

Rondel’s work reflects the romanticism and naturalism transmitted through this tradition. After arriving from Europe, he was active in Boston between 1855 and 1857 and soon after established himself in Massachusetts, while maintaining a studio in New York. From 1862 to 1868 he returned to Europe, but following the Civil War resumed work in New York, where he became an Associate of the National Academy of Design and later taught on its faculty. Throughout the course of his career, Rondel painted landscapes and genre scenes that were exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Art Association, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Today his work is included in the permanent collections of respected institutions that include the Bear and Weil Galleries—Wheaton College, The Butler Institute of American Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the New Britain Museum of American Art.