As early as 1904 Friesz had his first one-man exhibition when the Galerie des Collectionneurs presented forty of his works to the public. In 1905 Berthe Weill began exhibiting Friesz, followed in 1907 by Druet, who bought many paintings from the artist, becoming his dealer, and featured him in personal and group exhibitions. It was from Druet that the majority of the pictures now in the Russian collections were purchased. Friesz was presented together with other Fauves at the Golden Fleece Salon in Moscow and at the exhibition held in Prague in 1910.

Friesz’s life and artistic career developed along roughly the same lines as those of his friends. He, too, went through periods of contemplating the legacy of Cézanne and the Cubism of Picasso. For him, however, the period of formal searching was a short one — he found that balance between design and colour which did not permit him to change what had been chosen from the very outset of his career. It is difficult to agree with Dorival’s opinion that in the years 1908-1911 Friesz experienced a definite crisis; it was rather a logical further step in his development, one in which his powerful, life-affirming painting was enriched by new plastic discoveries.[53]

Friesz liked to travel, often together with one or other of his friends, around Germany and Italy. A trip to Portugal in 1911 made a tremendous impression on him. At the outbreak of the war he was mobilized. In 1915, Friesz painted a portrait of Andrée Rey, who was soon to become his wife. After the war Friesz took a studio on the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Paris where he worked for the rest of his life. In the 1920s and 1930s he painted a great deal in Provence, his native Normandy, and in the Jura mountains. He lived for a long time in Toulon and travelled to Italy, Belgium, and America. From 1925 onwards, French museums began to purchase Friesz’s paintings and in 1933 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. Like Dufy, Friesz tried his hand in the applied arts — his carpet entitled La Paix was exhibited in 1935, and in 1937 he created one of the wall-paintings for the World Fair in the Palais de Chaillot. But for Friesz painting would always remain in first place. After the Second World War he was offered a chair at the École des Beaux-Arts, but he turned it down. Othon Friesz died in his Paris studio on 10 January 1949.

Researchers call the years 1900-1904 the Impressionist period in Friesz’s œuvre.[54] Fritz Vanderpyl even expressed the opinion that if Friesz’s Fauvist friends had not entered his life, he would have followed the path taken by Eugène Boudin.[55] The Russian collections do not provide a basis for judging the validity of these statements nor even enable us to see Friesz’s painting as it was at the time of the Fauves’ first presentations. But a sketch for the painting Travaux d’Automne demonstrates the artist’s maturity. Friesz worked on this painting in Matisse’s studio on the Rue Sevres. It was bought for Norway and hangs in the National Gallery in Oslo. The sketch has a special attraction arising from a greater abstraction of colour and shape than is seen in the final variant and the expressiveness of the texture. Two directions taken by the artist in his search are reflected here. First of all, there is light born of contrasts of colour — warm and cold, which in this work are still fairly resonant. A yellow, only rarely attaining the warmth of the red, stands alongside a green and a blue, which are not so much means of denoting trees or shadows as naturally arising, purely painterly requirements. At the same time the large, freely placed patches of colour model in a sculptural fashion the shape not only of a human figure or the crown of a tree, but of the very space in which every element becomes an inseparable part of the composition. “For me composition represents the clearest means of expressing what one has on one’s mind,” the artist said.[56]