![Frederick Carl Frieseke - The Garden Pool [c.1913]](http://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5046/29263500313_14de906eef_b.jpg)
From our very first encounter with The Garden Pool, there is conflict in the nature of the experience, as there might be in our appreciation of the work going into an architect’s design of a comfortable building. The substance of The Garden Pool depends not on its subject, but its design; and here Frieseke takes liberties that amount to daring. The canvas is consciously, even defiantly, symmetrical, with the model’s bowed head entered so that the composition radiates from it. Despite the garden setting, we are thrown into a conflicting field of strongly defined horizontal and vertical forces, even down to the application of the brush strokes, that accentuate the vertical strength of the bending figure, as well as setting off the abbreviated lozenge of the pool that our knowledge of the world compels us to believe exists on the same horizontal as the floor we stand on. The experience of swirling vertiginous colour becomes coherent only because it is organised by the severity of the design of the canvas.
[Sotheby’s, New York - Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 81.9 cm]