When Fred Freeman died in June 1988, the United States lost one of its most respected marine artists. Probably best known to the naval community for his striking ink illustrations in the naval Institute’s histories of United States Submarine Operations in World War II (1949) and its Destroyer Operations (1953) counterpart. Freeman used a variety of mediums to depict a spectrum of naval subjects ranging from Greek galleys and Civil War ironclads to nuclear submarines. Yet he was by no means exclusively a marine artist. In the course of a 60-year career that spanned the golden age of magazine illustration, he contributed story and advertising art to leading publications at home and abroad, including The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Life, Look, Esquire, The Illustrated London News, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. As a participant in NASA’s fine arts program he helped to depict man’s journey into space.1
Whatever its subject. Freeman’s art is characterized by meticulous research and fidelity to detail. When friends asked why he had included some unsightly overhead utility lines in an otherwise idyllic New England street scene, he replied tartly, “Because they’re there." To his first and only wife, he explained, “I am an historian of my time.”2
Freeman’s goal was not simply to duplicate the camera’s eye, however. He aimed to capture the essence of a moment. In the figures that people his thoroughly realistic settings, there is frequently a subtle idealization of the human form, a barely perceptible exaggeration of rippling muscles, wide shoulders, and waspish waists, designed to enhance the impact of the composition. It seems indicative of the dramatic sensibility evident in his work that Freeman often said that if he had not been an artist, he would have liked to be an actor, and enjoyed playing in amateur theatricals. In his early seventies he told an interviewer that, despite the great care he took to ensure technical accuracy, it was not the critical ingredient of a successful work. The most important, and the most difficult element he defined as “the picture idea . . . something you feel, as opposed to something you think .... Once you get it, you can paint any kind of story you like.”5
A gracious, high-spirited man with a warm sense of humor, Freeman took an active part in the social and civic activities of Essex, his Connecticut home; but he was also a compulsive worker, who would begin to grow restless after two days outside his studio. He even carried his sketch-pad to weekend house parties, retiring to his bedroom in the afternoon to work up studies for forthcoming projects. Deeply devoted to his family—in part, perhaps, because he himself came from a broken home—Freeman brought its members into his art, using his wife, their two children, and, eventually, seven grandchildren as models and helpers. “His work was his whole life,” Mrs. Freeman recalls. “The studio ruled the house.”4
Fred (officially, Frederic William) Freeman was born in Boston in September 1906 and grew up in Maine. His love of art stemmed from early childhood. As a 12-year-old he attended a circus in New York in which 1,000 performers appeared on stage simultaneously and, upon his return home, painstakingly reconstructed the scene—complete with 1,000 performers.
Freeman graduated from Hebron Academy in Maine at the age of 16. College was next on the paternal agenda but not his, and he ran away to New York City to become an artist, bankrolled with fifteen dollars borrowed from a friend. During the next two decades he studied under some of the city’s foremost artists, worked in a succession of agencies and studios, married, and won his first Art Directors’ Club Medal—the first of six major awards he would receive. By the eve of World War II he had established himself as a free-lance artist. He had also become an enthusiastic yachtsman, whose experiences included swimming home from a cruise in which a friend’s 52-foot yawl, the Arabian, wrecked on the coast of New Jersey.
Upon the outbreak of war Freeman volunteered for the Navy, expecting that, with his professional background, he would be employed designing camouflage schemes. Instead, he was commissioned into the unrestricted line. Years later, he joked that the Arabian might have been responsible: “The Navy evidently decided that, having been shipwrecked once. I’d know better than to let it happen again—so they kept me at sea for practically the whole war.”5
In fact. Freeman was kept in command of small combatants. The first was the Admiral (SP-967), a 75-foot converted yacht operating in New England waters, of which he became commanding officer in February 1942, three months after entering the Navy. That summer he was transferred to the Pacific and given command of the 110-foot subchaser SC-521. In this craft he served in the Southwest Pacific and participated in the invasions of Saipan and Guam; in the latter the SC- 521 was one of four subchasers that marked the inner lanes to the northern beaches. After Guam, he was assigned to command the PCE-895, a 180-foot escort vessel in the Aleutians. In April 1945 his ship was at a repair dock on Attu when a gasoline tanker tied up alongside her burst into flames. With quick-witted courage. Freeman had the PCE-895 tow the tanker away from the dock and used her pumps to extinguish the blaze. He received the Navy Commendation Medal for that day’s work. Finally, after 36 months in the Pacific, he went ashore as officer-in-charge of the art unit employed in illustrating manuals at the Bureau of Personnel in Washington, D.C.
Returning to his studio after the war. Freeman chose to remain in the Naval Reserve. Early in 1946 he was recalled to temporary active duty to design and illustrate a popular history of the exploits of the Navy’s submarine force, whose activities had necessarily been kept secret during the war. Theodore Roscoe would write the text. The result, three years in gestation, was the classic United States Submarine Operations in World War II, for which Freeman produced 103 paintings, drawings, and maps. Reviewing the book in the New York Herald Tribune, historian Walter Millis extolled the artist’s skill in “conveying in an exact, architectural style, a powerful sense of those scenes and moments which no camera could ever catch.”6 This highly acclaimed work was followed by a companion volume on Destroyer Operations to which Freeman contributed 130 drawings. Almost 40 years after their publication, both books remain in print.
In the wake of these successes. Freeman and Roscoe undertook a Picture History of the U. S. Navy for Scribner’s. Most of the art was to come from Roscoe’s extensive personal collection; Freeman would fill in the gaps. To do so in a manner that would blend with 19th century naval prints, he developed a lithography process using sand-blasted acetate as a printing surface in place of stone. Unfortunately, only one of the two projected volumes was completed. Published in 1956, it contained 21 lithographs by Freeman. Subsequently, he used this technique to illustrate a new edition of Two Years Before the Mast (1969) and Event 1000, later retitled Grey Lady Down (1971), a book based on the loss of the submarine USS Thresher (SSN-593) in 1963.
In the meanwhile, the public had first viewed the Navy’s premier nuclear- powered submarine, the Nautilus (SSN- 571), in a dramatic painting by Freeman on the cover of Collier’s for December 1952-—nearly two years before the boat’s commissioning. Inside was an article for which Freeman’s drawings had been personally cleared by Captain Hyman G. Rickover. Years later. Freeman prepared a slide presentation used to brief President John F. Kennedy on the operation of the Polaris missile launched from the Nautilus’s progeny.
Freeman was also among the artists involved in a “space symposium” conducted by Collier’s from 1952 to 1954. Two of the series of articles for which he furnished illustrations, “Across the Space Frontier” and “Conquest of the Moon,” were afterwards published as books. He also designed and illustrated First Men to the Moon (1960), by Wem- her von Braun, another space symposium participant, with whom he had become friends. Freeman’s association with space themes continued in later years when he was designated to take part in NASA’s fine arts program.
As many of the great magazines for which he had worked succumbed to the tube, Freeman found that his reputation as a historical painter ensured a demand for his art. Time-Life Books engaged him to produce an illustrated history of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack. Published as Duel of the Ironclads (1969), the book contained 30 carefully researched paintings and drawings, one of which, “The Merrimack Steaming out of Gosport Navy Yard,” won the Society of Illustrators’ Medal. He also contributed historical art to a number of other Time-Life publications.
Fred Freeman retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of commander in 1968. At that time he had been to sea in and illustrated almost every type of vessel in the Navy’s inventory. He never really retired from his studio. In 1979 he was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists and a few years later a retrospective exhibition of his art attracted more than 25,000 viewers. His last painting, a submarine scene inspired by an article in the June 1985 Proceedings, was completed in 1987. Today his works hang in The Mariners’ Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Naval Academy Museum, the National Air and Space Museum, the Coast Guard Museum, and many other collections. They are an enduring legacy.
1. The author is deeply indebted to Mrs. Fred Freeman and Mr. Randy Lieberman for providing the information and materials upon which this profile is based. Especially valuable was the unpublished brief biography, “Fred Freeman: Observer for the People, His Life and Work,” © 1978 by Katharine Brewer, the artist’s granddaughter. Catalogues of the major exhibitions of Freeman’s maritime art are contained in the collection of the Naval Institute Photographic Library.
2. Mrs. Fred Freeman to the author, May 1989.
3. Charlotte Ryerson, “The Seascapes of Fred Freeman.” The Hartford Courant Magazine, 25 November 1980, p. 10.
4. Mrs. Fred Freeman to the author, May 1989.
5. Ashley Halsey, Jr., Illustrating for The Saturday Evening Post (Boston, MA: Arlington House, 1951), р. 53.
6. “Finally, the Submariners’ Great Story.” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 12 March 1950, p. 7, с. 3.