According to William Dunlap, Frederick Agate's childhood propensity for drawing "beasts, birds, and 'things in general'" was initially encouraged by the engraver William Rollinson. Through Rollinson's influence Agate was sent to New York in about 1820, to study under the drawing master John Rubens Smith; Thomas Seir Cummings was a fellow student. In 1825, when Agate was a student of Samuel F. B. Morse and Cummings was working under Henry Inman, it was these two aspiring artists whose unhappy encounter with John Trumbull, president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, precipitated the creation of the alternative organization, the New-York Drawing Association, which quickly was reconstituted as the National Academy of Design.
Like many of his colleagues, Agate aspired to historical painting, but found portraiture the more stable source of income. He departed New York for Europe in 1834. After a brief stay in Paris he removed to Florence, where he studied the old masters and became increasingly committed to historical painting. Within a year, however, he contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to New York. With his health temporarily restored Agate devoted himself ever more diligently to historical and religious painting, though portraiture remained his stock-in-trade.
Agate was an active member of the Academy and a constant, prolific contributor to its annual exhibitions, through the year of his death, excepting only the two years he was abroad. Agate was elected to the Council in the spring of 1839. In January 1840, by authority of the Council, he was made the Academy's curator (sometimes called "keeper"), in which capacity he retained a place on the Council into 1842. Nowhere in Academy records is this position clearly defined; however, the curatorship seems to have involved supervisory responsibility for the management of the School, and of Academy property. He had been the school's lecturer in perspective in the season of 1830-31, and for the four seasons from 1840 to 1844 was recorded as the instructor of drawing.
Upon Agate's death Thomas Seir Cummings prepared the eulogy entered into the minutes of the annual meeting of 1844:
To his excellent qualities as a member of the Institution, we can as a body bear ample witness. To his virtues as a man, and the uniform kindly deportment which characterized his intercourse with us, we can all individuallly bear truthful testimony.
ABG & JPH
