Jane Freilicher (November 19, 1924 – December 9, 2014) was an American representational painter of urban and country scenes from her homes in lower Manhattan and Water Mill, Long Island. She was a member of the informal New York School beginning in the 1950s, and a muse to several of its poets and writers. Freilicher was at the center of a milieu of important New York painters and poets, including painters Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and poets of the New York School including John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. Along with Frankenthaler, Hartigan, Mitchell, and Nell Blaine, she was among only a handful of women artists who were exhibiting alongside their male counterparts. In 1996 she was awarded the Annual Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York. Personal life Jane Niederhoffer was born in Brooklyn on November 19, 1924. Her parents were linguist Martin and musician Bertha Niederhoffer. She enjoyed painting and drawing as a young child and thought "I might do something in art, not for fame or achievement, but out of a romantic inclination to beautiful things. A free-floating feeling that something was creative in me." At 17 she graduated from high school and eloped with Jack Freilicher, a jazz pianist. They were married from about 1941 to 1946, when the marriage was annulled. She met Larry Rivers through Jack Freilicher and Hans Hofmann and in the 1950s Rivers and Freilicher were good friends. In 1952 she met Joe Hazan, who was a businessman and dancer before becoming a painter. They were married in 1957 and had one child, Elizabeth. She lived and worked on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and the couple had a summer house which they built on Mecox Bay in Water Mill on Long Island, New York. Hazan died on October 27, 2012 at 96 years of age. Freilicher died in Manhattan at the age of 90 on December 9, 2014. She is survived by her daughter, painter Elizabeth Hazan, and three grandchildren, Lucian, Katherine, and Benjamin Hicks. Art Freilicher studied art under Hans Hofmann and in 1947 earned her bachelor's degree at Brooklyn College. She received her master's degree in 1948 from Columbia University's Teacher's College, where the art historian Meyer Schapiro was one of her teachers. As the result of Hofmann's influence she first