![]() ![]() She continued with Prang until 1899. In the meantime, she worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.īy 1890 she was living in Stratford, Conn. In 1881, she began working for Louis Prang, the Boston printer who popularized the Christmas card in America. She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., where the marshes and meadows along the Housatonic River gave her much to paint. Fidelia traveled with Whitney and Manning, who belonged to actress Charlotte Cushman’s circle of expatriate American women.įidelia returned to the United States in 1868, where she exhibited her watercolors of flowers and birds at the National Academy of Design. American artists then had to go to Europe to study great works of art because the United States had no public collections. ![]() In 1865 she returned to Brooklyn, establishing a studio on the top floor of the Browns’ house with Anne Whitney and Whitney’s companion, Adeline Manning, a painter from Boston.Īt the end of the Civil War, she studied art in Rome for a year. ![]() She opened her own studio in Philadelphia, and collectors began to buy her work. Richards, renowned for his realistic paintings of the White Mountains, took Fidelia under his wing. Whitney encouraged her to pursue her art and, with the Browns’ financial help, she studied art in Philadelphia with William Trost Richards. Discovering Artįidelia Bridges had befriended Anne Whitney, an acclaimed artist who designed the sculpture of Sam Adams in Boston’s Dock Square. Fidelia and her sister Elizabeth took up the running of the school. Brown moved his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Eliza, Elizabeth and Henry followed Fidelia.Įliza started a school in Brooklyn, but died of tuberculosis after two years. Then, to support herself, she got a job as a mother’s helper to a successful Quaker merchant, William Augustus Brown. Their father’s death forced Eliza to auction the family furniture and move to a smaller house.įidelia studied drawing during her convalescence from a long illness. Her mother died three hours before the news of Henry Bridges’ death arrived in Salem.įidelia’s oldest sister Eliza taught school and cared for her orphaned younger siblings, including Elizabeth and Henry. When Fidelia Bridges was 15, her father died while overseas in Whampoa. The family lived at 100 Essex Street, now known as the Fidelia Bridges Guest House. ![]() He is said to have brought back many curios for what is now the Peabody-Essex Museum. Her father carried a set of Shakespeare’s works with him on his voyages and was an accomplished carver. Henry Gardiner Bridges and Eliza Chadwick Bridges. Like another Salem artist, Frank Benson, she loved the outdoors. She “Paints as if the year were all springtime,” wrote one critic.įidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Though now largely forgotten, she earned renown among the artists of her time.įidelia Bridges limited her subjects to birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility. Fidelia Bridges often felt lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.ĭuring her lifetime, she was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |