FREDERICK ARTHUR BRIDGMAN: AN ARTIST'S JOURNEY
WATERCOLORS AND DRAWINGS ON THE NILE, 1873-1874

On December 22, 1873, an aspiring young American painter, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, embarked on a voyage up the Nile. The trip, which lasted just over three months, marked the beginning of a much longer journey, one that was to preoccupy him as an artist for rest of his long life. By the time he disembarked on April 2, 1874, the direct encounter with the African continent--its light and imagery, its peoples and customs--had determined Bridgman's true calling: He was about to become the foremost American practitioner of the art of Orientalism--the romantic portrayal of the people, mysteries and sensual pleasures of exotic lands--in Bridgman's case, those of North Africa.

Bridgman's life began in Tuskegee, Alabama, on 10 November 1847. As a teenager already intent on an artistic career, he served an apprenticeship as a draftsman at the American Bank Note Company in New York, at the same time studying with the Brooklyn Art Association and taking antique life classes at the National Academy of Design.

By 1866 Bridgman was in Paris, where he enrolled at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts and studied with Jean-Léon Gérôme (1842-1904), the celebrated painter of Near-Eastern and Middle-Eastern subjects. [Bridgman's compatriots Edwin Lord Weeks and H. H. Moore also studied with Gérôme, becoming distinguished Orientalists.] Bridgman was to live the rest of his live in France, making occasional visits to the United States, where he was a member of the National Academy of Design [Associate 1874/full member from 1881].

In spite of his training with Gérôme, it was not until after his pivotal first visit to Africa that Bridgman began to paint Orientalist subjects. Following an early visit to Pont-Aven, he had tended to concentrate on genre subjects; later, a visit to the Pyrenees was to engage his interest in the depiction of European landscape. Africa had to wait until he had seen it, in a journey up the Nile--paper, pencil, and watercolors in hand.

From 1874, fired by his new enthusiasm for African subject matter, Bridgman quickly became both fashionable and successful, exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, as well as in New York and London. The watershed Nile journey inspired Bridgman to a new level of accomplishment, and the studies made on the spot were to supply him with subject matter for a series of ambitious oil paintings on which rests he considerable reputation. Some highly acclaimed works were Funeral of a Mummy (1876-77), now in the J. B. Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY; and his first major Salon success in 1877; in the same year, Towing on the Nile, exhibited at the Royal Academy, London [no. 344]; Diversions of an Assyrian King (1877-78) and Procession of the Apis Bull (1878-79), both of which were shown at the Paris Salon.

His skills as a writer, violinist, and composer, combined with his status as a painter, attracted a glamorous, international entourage of admirers and friends to his house and salon on the Boulevard Malesherbes.

The watercolors and drawings in the present collection, many annotated with dates and locations, thus offer a window on to a life-changing excursion. Some demonstrate an intensely observant eye for local detail; others are urgently smudged on the page to catch a fleeting impression. We are reminded now of Delacroix or Sargent, now of Ruskin or Lear. Bridgman's senses are here exposed to new light, new shapes, and new color, and his intellect is aroused and greedy for insight into an ancient civilization seen with fresh eyes.

In the light of his success Bridgman was accorded a number of solo exhibitions, including an important one at the American Art Gallery in New York City, which included finished paintings as well as studies. In 1887 his work was exhibited in London at the Fine Art Society and the following year he received the Légion d'honneur at the Paris Exposition Universelle.

Bridgman's approach to his subject matter was less fanciful than that of some of his contemporaries when depicting the people and places of North Africa. His paintings were always well received, his success constantly affirmed, until, with the approach of the new century and increasing interest in the Impressionist movement, the fashion for Bridgman's style began to wane. The last decades of his life were hard, and financial worries abounded. He died in Rouen, France, in 1928, his glittering days in Paris a distant memory. A hundred years later, Orientalism back in fashion and back in the marketplace. Recently Bridgman's Nubian Storyteller of 1875--a superb depiction of an imagined harm and its colorful, drowsy inhabitants--was sold in London for over £450,000.

These drawings, brilliant glimpses of his early discovery of Egypt, offer insights to the painter's longer journey--that which had modest beginnings in Alabama, and led via riches in Paris and hardship in Normandy to an enduring place in the history of nineteenth-century art, as "the American Gérôme."

Bridgman carefully preserved these seminal drawings in an inscribed, leather-bound album. At one point, some were removed and the remainder remounted. They were in the artist's estate when it was finally dispersed in 1954; and most bear the estate stamp. Several from the present group of drawings have recently sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; others are destined for public collections elsewhere, testimony to their importance both as works of art and as documents of singular importance in the career of a great American-born artist.