Pierre Édouard Frère was born in Paris on 10 January 1819 to a creative family. His father Antoine Charles Frere was a music publisher and his brother was the orientalist painter Charles-Théodore Frère. In 1836 at the age of 17, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1836 and studied under Paul Delaroche. He became interested in Realism and became one of the leading exponents of the “sympathetic art” movement in France, which sought to portray the lower classes with dignity and sympathy.

Frere married Gabrielle Susanne Bosquet and their son Charles Edouard Frere (1837-1894) also became a genre artist. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1843 and over the years won several medals. He also won a third-class medal at the 1855 Exposition Universelle and in the same year was named Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur.

He spent most of his life living in Ecouen in Seine et Oise, having moved there in 1847 and from this point he began specialising in paintings of children. Although he did paint a series of Orientalist subjects after travelling to Egypt in 1860, his main output became his paintings of everyday people, usually children.

In 1868 he made his debut at the Royal Academy exhibiting numerous paintings there until the year before his death. Frere died on 23 May 1886 at Ecouen. Examples of his paintings can be found at the Atkinson Art Gallery, Dundee Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Sudley House and the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.