Frederick Arthur BRIDGMAN (Tuskegee 1847- Lyons-La -Forêt1928)

The passage of the wadi Oil on panel one board not parqueted 18,5 x 24 cm Signed lower right F.A Bridgman Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born in Alabama, the son of an itinerant doctor from Massachusetts. After attending classes at the Brooklyn Art Association and later 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 made his first trip to Spain and North Africa. He first visited Tangier in Morocco and then moved to Algeria where he rented a small studio in Biskra and began to work in situ. He returned to North Africa and traveled to Egypt, then again to Algeria where he settled in a small house. From this "Walnut Shell" (as he called it himself), he found a prime vantage point from which to paint domestic scenes and moments of daily life, as well as to capture the specific colors of North Africa. As he would later recall, he was "completely surrounded and enveloped by whites -whites of yellow, gray, blue, green and pink- of delicious light and shade, of those refined tones so difficult to render on canvas and for which one must struggle..."