Frederick Judd Waugh received training at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Académie Julien in Paris. Between 1892 and 1907 he lived in Europe and began his study of the sea, spending considerable time on the Island of Sark in the English Channel.
Upon returning to the United States, he continued to concentrate on the sea as the primary focus of his art at his first residence in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. Waugh’s intense study and understanding of the motion of waves as they break against the shoreline and the effects of light refracting through them resulted in an almost uncanny realism and feeling of three dimensionality in his best work.