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Artist or Maker: Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American, 1847-1927)

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Provenance: Private Collection, France.

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Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1910, no. 521 Monte-Carlo, Exposition Internationale des Beaux-Arts, (date unknown).

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Notes: Frederick Arthur Bridgman was one of the first American artists to achieve an international reputation. He went to Paris to study as a young man and remained in France the rest of his life. A genre and landscape painter, Bridgman achieved fame as an Orientalist for his stunning, realist views of people, cultures, and land of North Africa.
Bridgman was born on November 10, 1847 in Tuskeegee, Alabama to a Massachusetts couple, Lovinia Jennings and Frederick Bridgman. His father died when he was three and his mother raised young Frederick and his two brothers alone, earning her living by teaching music. After completing his schooling in Massachusetts, Bridgman moved to Brooklyn where his elder brother was already residing. He became an apprentice to the American Bank Note Company in 1863 while taking drawing classes at night at the Brooklyn Art Association. In 1863 or early 1864 he enrolled in the antique life class at the National Academy of design. The first public showing of his work occurred in 1865 when Evening Prayer was included in that year's fall exhibition at the Brooklyn Art Association.

The financial backing of a group of Brooklyn gentlemen enabled Bridgman to continue his studies in Paris. After acclimating himself to the French capital, where he arrived in June 1866, he went to the Breton village of Pont Aven where he spent the remainder of the summer and into the fall painting French peasants with the American artist Robert Wylie. Although Bridgman was in France specifically to seek academic instruction he did not enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until February 1867. He was accepted into the atelier of the great French figure painter Jean-Léon Gérôme. Gérôme was a demanding teacher and harsh in his critiques, nonetheless, he was very popular with American students.
Bridgman spent the summer and autumn seasons of 1872 in the Pyrenées. His experience with the clear air, intense sunlight and the Moorish element he found in Spanish architecture, plus his encounter with the sensuous color of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny brought about a lightening of Bridgman's palette and kindled his interest in the exotic land that lay across the Straight of Gibraltar. Making his way down the Iberian peninsula, he departed for North Africa, a trip that would prove to be the turning point in his career. From the late autumn of 1872 to the spring 1873 Bridgman traveled through Maghrib, visiting Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, this time venturing inland and exploring the oasis towns that bordered the Sahara Desert.

Some fifteen years after his first tour of North Africa, Bridgman compiled his reminiscences in Winters in Algeria (1890), which he authored and illustrated. Whereas America's other famous Orientalist, Edwin Lord Weeks, painted in city streets and other public areas, Bridgman managed to gain access to the harem and painted women in the domestic setting of their cultures.

In 1881 Bridgman had his first one-man show in the United States. Organized by the American Art Gallery in New York, the exhibition opened in February. Over 300 paintings were displayed including French peasant subjects and landscapes, but the vast majority were Orientalist images. The exhibition was a great success both with connoisseurs and critics. 'The Art Journal felt that Bridgman's accomplishment was especially remarkable considering his elaborate method, which entailed extensive research and highly finished paintings.' (I. S. Fort, Frederick Arthur Bridgman and the American Fascination with the exotic Near East, vol. I and II, Ph. D. diss., City University of New York, 1990, p. 296).

As Bridgman matured as an artist, he relinquished the photographic realism of Gérôme for a looser technique and one incorporating more light and brighter color. In 1899 a critic wrote: 'Mr. Bridgman now paints with a freer, juicier brush than he used some years ago, he has got almost entirely away from Gérôme, he is now [sic] longer photographic, his color lacks unity and moderation, yet it is often more ingeniously applied, and like so many of his fellows he is aiming for decorative effect.' ('Gallery and Studio: Frederick A. Bridgman's Recent Pictures', Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 January 1899, p. 28, as quoted in Fort, p. 429).

Bridgman continued to paint Orientalist themes well into the 20th Century. Spain in the Days of the Moors certainly displays the effects praised in the 1899 review; moreover, this work shows Bridgman's realism modified by modernist principles, most obvious in the strong silhouetted tree forms. Brightly reflected sunlight off the patio's pavement and off the building at center, the contrasting colors of the flowers and foliage, and the girl's intensely colored garments all are elements of Fortuny's influence.

This work has been authenticated by Ilene Susan Fort.