8/3/2023 0 Comments Fidelia bridges paintings![]() ![]() ![]() In company with her contemporary, fellow New England native Winslow Homer, Bridges helped to popularize watercolors. “In her best pictures she arranges blossoms and branchlets in a design reminiscent of Japanese prints, combined with the minutiae of the bird in the tree or the leaves on the ground.” “Many artists paint beautiful pictures, but few change our ideas of art and beauty as Bridges did,” Manthorne writes. Manthorne, a professor at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, writes that Bridges’ art wasn’t merely popular - it was striking and important. In the 1870s, when a fondness for Japanese art and design swept from the upper-class collectors and art patrons to middle-class women, Bridges could barely keep up with the demand for her work, Manthorne writes. ![]() In the 1860s, she incorporated elements of Asian design into her paintings of flowers and birds. Bridges kept china and books about Japanese art with her throughout her life. A member of the East India Marine Society - the precursor to the Peabody Essex Museum - her father likely carried back from his overseas voyages China trade paintings, porcelain, and other examples of Asian art and design that caught Bridges’ eye. ![]() It wasn’t just her father’s loss that shaped Bridges as an artist, though. With her sisters’ support and her own doggedness, she turned her hobby into a profession. Family lore has it that it was there that Bridges spent hours in bed drawing. Sickened by her own sadness, Bridges was invited by family friends to recuperate in the countryside. Just three hours before the tragic news reached home, her mother died, leaving Bridges and her three siblings orphaned. A ship’s captain, he died of yellow fever in Canton, China, in December 1849. Manthorne shows how Bridges was shaped by her childhood among the seafaring society of Salem, and how she transformed the painting of flowers from a domestic pastime for ladies into an acceptable form of high art.īridges was just 16 years old and living in what is now the Fidelia Bridges Guest House of the Hawthorne Hotel, on Essex Street in Salem, when news of her father’s death reached the family in March of 1850. This portrait of Fidelia Bridges by Oliver Ingraham Lay, c.1877, an oil on canvas mounted on wood, is part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. A century after her death, her works are commanding high prices at auctions, and in a new book, “ Fidelia Bridges: Nature Into Art,” art historian Katherine Manthorne makes the case for getting to know Bridges and her beautiful and important artwork. There’s the House of Seven Gables museum and the Hawthorne Hotel.īut on the grounds of the hotel is a guest house named for another 19th-century artist from Salem who also achieved considerable acclaim in her lifetime, the painter Fidelia Bridges.Īlthough less well known now than Hawthorne, Bridges is attracting renewed interest. Living in Marblehead, it’s hard to miss the local pride for Nathaniel Hawthorne. ![]()
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