Frederick Arthur BRIDGMAN (Tuskegee 1847- Lyons-La... Lot 44

Frederick Arthur BRIDGMAN (Tuskegee 1847- Lyons-La -Forêt1928) The passage of the wadi Oil on panel a non-parquetted board 18,5 x 24 cm Signed lower right F.A Bridgman Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born in Alabama, son of an itinerant doctor from Massachusetts. After taking classes at the Brooklyn Art Association and later at the National Academy of Design, he began exhibiting his work in 1865 and 1866. Quickly noticed in Brooklyn, a group of businessmen financed his move to Paris where he joined the studio of the master Jean-Léon Gérôme in the fall of 1866. His career soon took a new direction when, in the winter of 1872-73, he undertook his first trip to Spain and North Africa. He first visited Tangier in Morocco and then settled in Algeria where he rented a small studio in Biskra and began working in situ. He returns to North Africa and travels to Egypt, then again to Algeria where he settles in a small house. From this " Coquille from Noix " (as he himself called it), he found a choice vantage point from which to paint domestic scenes and moments of daily life, as well as to capture the specific colours of North Africa. As he would later recall, he was " complètement surrounded and enveloped in whites - yellow, grey, blue, green and pink - delicious shadows and lights, those refined tones so difficult to render on canvas and for which one has to fight... ".