Frederick Rondel, born in Paris in 1826, where he had studied under romantic marine and landscape painters Auguste Jungelet and Theodore Gudin. Upon arriving in Boston, Massachusetts in 1855, he made a living as a lithographer and a painter and moved to South Malden, Massachusetts in 1859. Rondel lived in New York City from the late 1850s and early 1860s, but after receiving commissions in 1862 from Matthew Vassar, founder of Vassar College, to complete two paintings—one of the Vassar home in England and the second, his United States home, he moved to Poughkeepsie, New York. While there, he received a second commission from Poughkeepsie businessman, Henry Frost to paint a genre scene called “The Picnic”.

Rondel made a last trip to Europe in 1862 and returned in 1865. He had become a member of the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1861, and upon his return, he began teaching there. He had among his students Winslow Homer (Homer’s only formal art training), Charles T. Phelan, and Felix Benedict Herzog (electrical engineer, patent attorney, artist and photographer). He spent his time in New York state, painting scenes of the Hudson River Valley, Adirondack Mountains and traveling throughout New England. Rondel, who painted in the manner of the Hudson River School, is considered to be a “4th tier” Hudson River School artist. In 1892 Rondel moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he remained until his death in 1892. 1868 he made a painting of a third, earlier, Vassar family home. Rondel traveled to San Francisco in 1875. He exhibited at the Brooklyn Art Association, National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), Boston Athenaeum and the Art Institute of Chicago.