Frederick Arthur Bridgman

From Alabama to Paris

Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born on 10 November 1847 in Tuskegee, Alabama. After his father died in 1850, his mother moved the family to New York. As a young man he worked as an engraver and draughtsman for the American Bank Note Company, studying art in his spare hours at the Brooklyn Art Association and the National Academy of Design.

In 1866, backed by a group of Brooklyn businessmen, he sailed for France. That autumn he entered the Paris studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts, alongside fellow Americans including Thomas Eakins, and spent his summers painting with the American artists at Pont-Aven in Brittany.

Light, colour and arches

Between 1872 and 1874 Bridgman travelled through Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. In Cairo he sketched the city’s monuments and street life, then sailed up the Nile as far as Abu Simbel, filling some three hundred sketches that fed his paintings for years. He collected costumes, architectural pieces and objects, and his Paris studio became famous for them.

His Funeral of a Mummy on the Nile was shown at the Paris Salon of 1877 and earned him the Cross of the Legion of Honour; it now hangs in the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in 1881. Later he wintered in Algiers and wrote and illustrated a book, Winters in Algeria. He was also a musician and composer. He died in Rouen, France, on 13 January 1928.

1. 1847Born in Tuskegee, Alabama.
2. 1864–66Engraver at the American Bank Note Company; studies in Brooklyn and at the National Academy of Design.
3. 1866Moves to Paris and enters the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme.
4. 1870Shows A Provincial Circus at the Paris Salon.
5. 1872–74Travels through North Africa and up the Nile.
6. 1877Funeral of a Mummy on the Nile at the Salon; Legion of Honour.
7. 1881Elected a National Academician.
8. 1928Dies in Rouen, France.