Little is known about the background and early life Frederick E. Cohen, who would later achieve local fame as the premiere painter in Detroit in the 1840s. He was born in England in 1818 and migrated to Canada, settling in Woodstock, Ontario. Having either volunteered or been conscripted into a Canadian militia in the so-called Patriot War of 1838, Cohen seems to have refused orders or perhaps to fight at all, and spent several months in jail in the city of Sandwich, now Windsor. There, lore has it, he decorated his cell with elaborate charcoal drawings that remained for years after his departure.
Frederick is first listed in the Detroit City Directory in 1846 as a portrait painter. In addition to his portraits of notable Michiganders, he received commissions from the State Agricultural Society and the Detroit volunteer fire company. He also painted decorative panels for the lake passenger steamers, as well as allegorical paintings and signboards for businesses. His genre and scene paintings, with titles like “Arabian Scene,” “the Artist’s Dream,” and “Italian Landscape” were widely praised. Frederick displayed work at the first public art exhibitions in Detroit, the Detroit Firemen’s Fairs of 1852 and 53. and He mentored two subsequently significant Michigan painters, Lewis F. Ives and Robert Hopkin
Frederick was known as something of an eccentric and a dandy, at least by the standards of 1840s Michigan. The Detroit News Tribune called him an “eccentric Bohemian,” and Armand H. Griffith, later director of the Detroit Museum of Art, said Frederick “was a true bohemian if ever there was one… endowed by nature with more than the usual share of talent, good looks, eloquence, and wit.” The story is recorded of a patron who commissioned portraits of himself and his daughter, and then, dissatisfied with Fredrick’s work, refused the paintings and withheld payment. Frederick, in turn, hung the paintings at the post office, but not before he added donkey ears to the father’s image and a napkin covering the face of the daughter. He was quickly paid to have the paintings removed.
In the 1840s he married Maria Louisa Roberts from Mount Vernon, Ohio, and after 1853 the couple moved to the area around Mount Vernon, where Frederick continued to paint. He died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1858.
