French Village oil on board painting by Frederick Dickinson Williams, signed FD Williams and dated 1846 in the lower left. Image depicts a French village scne with a pond, where a woman is washing clothes and others walking around for a midday stroll. Williams was born into a patrician household in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1829. He attended the prestigious Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University in 1846. After graduation, and from 1850 to 1874, Dickinson taught drawing and painting in the Boston Public School System as a Professor of Drawing until 1874 when Dickinson and his wife, the former Lucia M. Hunt, of Newburyport, relocated to Paris, France, where both studied the new French art and painted landscapes and genre scenes in their studio until 1888, when Lucia died in Paris. Williams died on January 25, 1915, in Brookline, Massachusetts, after a long illness. His Obituary reappeared in the Harvard Graduates Magazine of June 1915, where Williams was remembered as “one of New England’s most noted landscape artists.” Overall size: 17 1/4 x 23 1/4 in. Sight: 11 1/4 x 17 1/4 in. Please note that all sales are final. No refunds will be given under any circumstances.