This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Frederick E. Cohen (1818-1858)
Noted as a portrait, genre, historical, scenery, and “fancy” painter, Frederick E. Cohen was born in England in 1818. He apparently immigrated to Upper Canada sometime before the Rebellion of 1837-38 and crossed into Detroit from Woodstock, Ontario in 1837. There he found employment as a decorative artist, painting panels for Great Lakes Passenger vessels.
He remained in Detroit until 1853, a successful and well-known, if eccentric, personification of the artistic profession, who seems to have played his role with gusto. As described in 1909 by Armand H. Griffith, then director of the Detroit Museum of Art, “He was a true bohemian if there ever was one…endowed by nature with more than the usual share of talent, good looks, eloquence and with a genial disposition…Cohen was a great favorite with everybody.” While in Detroit he executed portraits of many notable Michigan citizens and also delved into his rich imagination for such canvases as Arabian Scene, Italian Landscape, The Artist’s Dream, Head of Saint Peter and Baptism of Christ, River Jordan.
Cohen was married sometime in the mid-1840’s to an Ohio woman, Maria Louisa Roberts of Mount Vernon, and by 1850 the couple spent summers on a farm outside Ankenytown, between Mount Vernon and Mansfield, Ohio. He is believed to have moved to the Mount Vernon area around 1855 where the remainder of his career was spent. While helping a neighbor to prepare his hogs for butchering, Cohen died of a stroke, December 7, 1858 in Ankenytown; he was buried in Mound View Cemetery, Mount Vernon.
The artist displayed his work at the Detroit Firemen’s Fairs in 1852 and 1853, two of the cities earliest public art exhibitions. He also exhibited at the Gallery of Fine Arts, Detroit in 1852; The American Art Union in 1848; and at several Michigan State Fairs. His work is represented in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Source:
Haverstock, Mary Sayre, et al; Artists in Ohio, 1787-1900, Kent State University Press, 2000. Gibson, Arthur Hopkin; Artists of Early Michigan, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1975.
Information courtesy of Edward P. Bentley, researcher from Lansing, Michigan |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Frederick E. Cohen was born in England (1818), as an English Jew he emigrated to Woodstock (Upper Canada) but left during the Canadian Rebellion of 1837 and settled in Detroit, Michigan.
As a portrait and genre painter, Cohen taught Lewis F. Ives and Robert Hopkin and in 1855 he moved from Detroit to Oberlin, Ohio.
Source:
Groce and Wallace, The New York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America |
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