(Annick Marshall in Cape
and Russian Hat)
What strikes me the most about this painting is the
costuming. The cape and Russian hat are a throwback to a time when our
cultural ethnicity was much more influential, from the foods we ate to the
clothes we wore. Now today as we have almalgamated into cultural
diversity, we dress and eat across ethnic boundaries.
This young girl prepares for a sleigh ride. Standing outdoors putting the
last glove on, perhaps she awaits for father to bring the horse drawn
sleigh for the ride to church on a January - December day? Before there
were road commissions and road ploughs, these sleighs were essential to
travel from place to place in the winter.
My mother’s father Henry Frerichs and his brother Fred were both farmers
in Nebraska in the early 1900’s. Both men were fond of horses, but Grandpa
Henry was renowned for his ability to break and tame horses, and to train
teams. In 1906 the two of them had a beautiful new barn built on Fred's
place. It was the first barn in the area that one could drive the team and
wagon (or sleigh for that matter) entirely into the barn and unhitch them
inside. Henry and his wife Mary bought a ranch in Montana, but on the
train up to Montana my grandfather caught the flu and died two weeks
later, a victim of the great flu epidemic of 1919 when over 500,000
Americans died of the flu.
In the mid 1990’s there was an auction of all the items left in the barn
at that time. This included old harnesses, horseshoes, farm implements and
more. In the summer of 2003 on a visit back to Nebraska, I discovered that
one of the items auctioned off was a hand - made sleigh built by my
grandfather Henry Frerichs. I now have relatives helping me search and
find the gentleman who bought it. It seems fortuitous that I had chosen to
paint this subject the winter before.
I have an old photo of my grandmother, Henry’s wife Mary. Like my young
model Annick Marshall, Mary was a brown haired beauty and this, too, seems
fortuitous.
Annick lives in the country northwest of Romeo and she actually posed out
of doors in the middle of winter for this painting.