Born in Rock Port, Missouri, in 1871, Frederick Mulhaupt apprenticed with a sign painter before studying at the Kansas City School of Design and eventually enrolling at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1890s. By 1904, he had established a studio at the Salmagundi Club in New York City and soon after departed for Paris to further his artistic studies. There he was introduced to the techniques of Impressionism still flourishing among both his fellow expatriates and European counterparts, which would later emerge in his own work. During several years abroad, Mulhaupt exhibited at the Paris Salon and explored the St. Ives region of England, where he sketched fishermen hauling their nets with the day’s catch, a theme carried over in his paintings of the wharves and sailors of Gloucester, Massachusetts, for which he is today best known.