Achille-Émile Othon Friesz, later known as Othon Friesz, was born on 6 February 1879 in Le Havre, into a family of shipbuilders and sea captains. In his lifetime he was famous for being a founding member of the Fauves – the rebellious but short-lived movement known for its ferocious colors and exuberantly gestural brushwork – before returning to his academic roots. As a child, he met Raoul Dufy, who became his lifelong friend and fellow artist. Friesz’s parents encouraged his natural flare for painting and enabled him to enroll at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Le Havre in 1892, where he would receive a traditional art education, with Dufy at his side. He studied under the famed Charles-Marie L’Hullier, one of Monet’s former students. It was at art school that Friesz met George Braque, with whom he traveled and became friends. In 1897, Friesz won a scholarship to study under Léon Bonnat at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Whilst he was there, he associated and learned with acclaimed painters such as Henri Charles Manguin, Albert Marquet, Henri Matisse, and Charles Camoin. His friendship with Camille Pissaro, by whom Friesz was much inspired, was especially formative for his painting style. Over the next few years, Friesz became caught up in the excitement of a new art movement that was happening in Paris, 'Fauvism', and he participated in the watershed Salon d'Automne in 1905 that rifled the sensibilities of critics and the public at large, but found an advocate in Ambroise Vollard. The Fauves would exert a profound influence on the trajectory of modern art in the twentieth century, paving the way for expressionism in all its powerful iterations. The forms of the subjects were also simplified, in a move towards abstract art. Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, and Maurice de Vlaminck were included in this group of artists, as well as Friesz, and his friend Raoul Dufy. The group itself drifted apart a few short years later. During the last thirty years of his life, Friesz abandoned the lively and brilliant colors of his Fauve style and returned to the more sober palette he had learned in Le Havre from his professor Charles Lhuillier, and to his more academic style – he had an early admiration for the Barbizon painters; Poussin, Chardin, and Corot. He painted in a manner that respected Cézanne's ideas of logical composition, simple tonality, the solidity of volume, and distinct separation of planes. In the last decades of his life, Friesz was a respected painter, illustrator, and teacher in the academic tradition, holding professorships at the Académie Scandinave from 1929 and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1941. He was active to the last, illustrating an edition of Petronius's Satyricon, and producing a suite of twelve lithographs for Mauriac's Désert de l'Amour in the months preceding his death on 10 January 1949. Friesz's work is represented in numerous major institutional collections, including the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.