Fredericks is known only from his record of exhibition, which indicates an active career in America as an artist from 1850 to the year of his death. Throughout this period he maintained his studio, at least, in New York. He was said to have begun his career as a theatrical scenery painter, but whether he had given up this craft before coming to America or after is not clear. The first appearance of his work in an Academy annual was in 1853 and his last in 1884. In the 1860s and 1870s Fredericks circulated the paintings he had shown at the Academy to a number of exhibition venues outside New York, especially to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, suggesting that his production in oils was limited.
This would be borne out by the evidence of his extensive involvement in the rise in the second half of the nineteenth century of watercolor as a respected medium of painterly expression.
In 1850 Fredericks was among the fifteen men who formed the New York Water Color Society, which three years later presented within the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition the first significant exhibition of watercolor paintings held in America. This organization was short-lived, but was the precursor of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors, formed late in 1866. Fredericks was among the eleven artists who founded that organization, and was a member of its first board of control.
From the Society's first annual exhibition in 1867 through 1906, its last during his lifetime, his work was rarely missing from their shows. (Fredericks's address given in the catalogue of the Society's 1906 exhibition was in Brooklyn, suggesting he was resident there at least in the year of his death.) Fredericks was also a successful and fairly prolific illustrator of books and magazines, and a regular participant in the Salmagundi Sketch Club Black and White exhibitions from the time of their initiation in 1878.
Whatever the media, his subject matter was almost exclusively narrative. In the 1860s he was much preoccupied with representing scenes from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets; as the century progressed, Fredericks choice of themes ranged widely, from The Angel of the Sepulcher to At the Bal Masque, Cinderella and her Grandmother, and The Flesh Pots of Egypt--this latter work shown at the Brooklyn (New York) Art Association in 1881.
In 1888, the Academy, acting on a by-law that was not long to survive, dropped Fredericks (among others) from its membership roster for having failed to contribute to annual exhibitions for two consecutive years. It seems likely that Fredericks was so devoted to the practice of the watercolor medium, and his work in illustration, that the expectations of the Academy for significant works in oil no longer interested him.
