Frederick Arthur Bridgman

Frederick Arthur Bridgman (November 10, 1847 – January 13, 1928) was an American artist known for his paintings of "Orientalist" subjects.

Life and career

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, Bridgman was the son of a physician. After his father died in 1850, his mother moved to New York City with her two sons. Bridgman began working as a draughtsman for the American Bank Note Company in 1864–65, and studied art in the same years at the Brooklyn Art Association and at the National Academy of Design. He exhibited his paintings at the Brooklyn Art Association, and encouraged by his success, he gave up his job in 1866 and moved to France with the sponsorship of a group of Brooklyn businessmen.

Bridgman's first destination in France was Pont-Aven in the Brittany region, where he stayed with a group of American artists, among them Robert Wylie. In the autumn of 1866, he went to Paris and entered the studio of the noted academic painter Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), where he was deeply influenced by Gérôme's precise draftsmanship, smooth finishes, and concern for Middle-Eastern themes. While studying in the atelier of Gérôme, he became acquainted with his fellow students Harry Humphrey Moore and Thomas Eakins and also first came in contact with Orientalism. He remained there for four years, spending his summers at Pont-Aven with Wylie.

Because of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Bridgman was forced to leave Paris in the early 1870s. After spending time in Britain and Spain, he made his first trips to North Africa between 1872 and 1874, dividing his time between Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt. On his trip to Egypt, he was accompanied by fellow artist Charles Sprague Pearce. Arriving in Cairo in December 1873, they worked in the city producing numerous sketches of the Islamic monuments, but also the street life, which was Bridgman's main inspiration. They travelled along the Nile, reaching Abu Simbel in the south of Egypt. During his trips, Bridgman executed approximately three hundred sketches, which became the source material for several later oil paintings that attracted immediate attention.

In 1877, Bridgman married Florence Mott Baker from Boston in Paris. He returned to North Africa in the winter of 1885–86, settling in Algiers with his wife. In 1889, he published the book Winters in Algeria, with memories and numerous woodcut illustrations from his travels to North Africa. His repeated visits to the region throughout the 1870s and 1880s allowed him to amass a collection of costumes, architectural pieces, and objets d'art, which often appear in his paintings. John Singer Sargent noted that Bridgman's overstuffed studio, along with the Eiffel Tower, were Paris's must-see attractions.

One of the greatest successes of his artistic career was his participation in the 1889 Paris Exposition, where five of his paintings were exhibited. Though Bridgman maintained a lifelong connection to France, his popularity in the US never waned. In 1890, the artist had a personal exhibition of over 400 pictures in New York's 5th Avenue galleries. When the show moved to Chicago's Art Institute, it contained only 300 works – testimony to the high number of sales Bridgman had made.

In 1901, his wife died of a neurological illness. In 1904, he married Marthe Yaeger. After the First World War, he left Paris and retired to Lyons-la-Forêt (Normandy) with his wife. He died in Rouen in 1928 at the age of 80.