Falls of Tamahaka, Cherokee County, North Carolina

Born in Belgium and raised in the Netherlands, William (formerly Wilhelm) Frerichs immigrated to the United States as a young man in 1850. This expansive North Carolina landscape exemplifies Frerichs’ deep attachment to western North Carolina, where the exquisite light and the variety of shapes, textures, and colors of cascading water and the Blue Ridge terrain inspired him at every turn.

While living in North Carolina between 1855 and 1868, Frerichs taught for eight years at the Greensboro Female College and survived an 1863 fire that destroyed most of his paintings and art objects. Today, more than half of Frerichs’ extant works are based on his Southern material, a testament to how this relatively brief period prior to his 1868 relocation to New York greatly influenced his artistic output. While this painting’s title implies an actual site, Tamahaka is likely an imagined or idealized place, a composite of sites from Frerichs’ sketches of nature in the highlands of North Carolina.