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Lot Essay
In the late 19th century, Frederick Arthur Bridgman was considered one of the most prominent of the American expatriate artists. Trained in Paris under the tutelage of the greatest of the French orientalist painters, Jean Léon Gérôme, Bridgman came to represent the embodiment of the American fascination with the Middle East.
It is important to separate the art of Bridgman, with its distinct approach to the images of the East, from that of Gerome. Ilene Susan Fort writes, ‘Bridgman is more than follower of Gérôme with little creative imagination of his own. While always returning to the elements of his master’s art, Bridgman also cast the East in the light of his own heritage, rejecting or modifying certain themes. Bridgman began turning away from Gérôme’s meticulous painting style, studio lighting and ethnological orientations in search of a more naturalistic view of the East’ (Susan Ilene Fort, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Ph. D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1990, p. 4).
Bridgman’s first contact with the Orient came during 1872-1873 on two extended trips to North Africa. At the time, Americans traveled to this region much less than their European counterparts, but the young artist made his way to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and then to Egypt and a trip up the Nile. Bridgman was also captivated by the Near East, particularly Algiers, and would return there often, driven by the desire to capture the life and light of this exotic place.
Genre painting of ordinary life in North Africa would come to be the focus of Bridgman’s art and would dominate the remainder of his oeuvre. Bridgman was determined to depict its landscape and inhabitants in the most authentic terms possible, and to this end he paid meticulous attention to the details of costumes, interiors, architecture and furnishings many of which he brought back from his travels and kept in his studio (fig. 1).
During his second visit to North Africa, Bridgman spent more time outside the cities, as his experience of the landscape and the light of the desert was to change his art. The effects of this are clearly evident in Chess Players, Biskra. The artist’s enhanced fascination with natural light and its effect on color and texture would dominate the later years of his oeuvre. Even his later interiors are open and light and executed in a glowing palette that departs radically from his earlier work and, more significantly, from the works of his master Gérôme. Along with this renewed interest in the effects of the light of the East came broader and more fluid brushwork. As atmosphere became more important to the artist, detailed precision became less so. One of Bridgman’s reviewers in 1880 wrote:
‘Here were vivid impressions of actual things, and vivid ways of recording those impressions. Here was feeling for color, and for tone, and more atmosphere, and for light and dark. Here were breadth of touch, rapacity of handling and strong effects. Here were vigor and earnestness that was not deliberation…studies undertaken…with an artist’s wish to fix forever the fleeting aspect that had charmed him’ (van Renssalaer, American Art Review, 2 June 1881, 50-51, pp. 180,183 of American Art and American Collections, reprint).
Everett Shinn wrote in the same year, ‘The painter’s hardest task is to get the color, the vivacity, the directness of the first sketch into the more ambitious and deliberate finished pictures and Bridgman has satisfied this demand with an unusually slight loss of power’ (E. Shinn, Art Amateur 4, no. 4, March 1881, p. 71).
Chess Players, Biskra is a perfect example of the artist working at the height of his career. The scene is set outside, in a courtyard bathed in the bright clear light of midday. The heat is palpable, and the four figures in the foreground sit on the ground, swathed in their white robes, passing the hottest hours of the day playing a game of chess. The atmosphere is one of heat and stillness; even the horses stand completely still in the shade of a tree. All of this is captured in broad brushstrokes executed in bold slashes of bright red-oranges which emphasize both the heat and the exotic nature of the scene. What Bridgman has reached for, and attained, in Chess Players, Biskra is the warmth, light and mood of a languid afternoon’s pastime in an exotic land.
(fig. 1) Frederick Arthur Bridgman in his studio, circa 1885.
It is important to separate the art of Bridgman, with its distinct approach to the images of the East, from that of Gerome. Ilene Susan Fort writes, ‘Bridgman is more than follower of Gérôme with little creative imagination of his own. While always returning to the elements of his master’s art, Bridgman also cast the East in the light of his own heritage, rejecting or modifying certain themes. Bridgman began turning away from Gérôme’s meticulous painting style, studio lighting and ethnological orientations in search of a more naturalistic view of the East’ (Susan Ilene Fort, Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Ph. D. dissertation, City University of New York, 1990, p. 4).
Bridgman’s first contact with the Orient came during 1872-1873 on two extended trips to North Africa. At the time, Americans traveled to this region much less than their European counterparts, but the young artist made his way to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and then to Egypt and a trip up the Nile. Bridgman was also captivated by the Near East, particularly Algiers, and would return there often, driven by the desire to capture the life and light of this exotic place.
Genre painting of ordinary life in North Africa would come to be the focus of Bridgman’s art and would dominate the remainder of his oeuvre. Bridgman was determined to depict its landscape and inhabitants in the most authentic terms possible, and to this end he paid meticulous attention to the details of costumes, interiors, architecture and furnishings many of which he brought back from his travels and kept in his studio (fig. 1).
During his second visit to North Africa, Bridgman spent more time outside the cities, as his experience of the landscape and the light of the desert was to change his art. The effects of this are clearly evident in Chess Players, Biskra. The artist’s enhanced fascination with natural light and its effect on color and texture would dominate the later years of his oeuvre. Even his later interiors are open and light and executed in a glowing palette that departs radically from his earlier work and, more significantly, from the works of his master Gérôme. Along with this renewed interest in the effects of the light of the East came broader and more fluid brushwork. As atmosphere became more important to the artist, detailed precision became less so. One of Bridgman’s reviewers in 1880 wrote:
‘Here were vivid impressions of actual things, and vivid ways of recording those impressions. Here was feeling for color, and for tone, and more atmosphere, and for light and dark. Here were breadth of touch, rapacity of handling and strong effects. Here were vigor and earnestness that was not deliberation…studies undertaken…with an artist’s wish to fix forever the fleeting aspect that had charmed him’ (van Renssalaer, American Art Review, 2 June 1881, 50-51, pp. 180,183 of American Art and American Collections, reprint).
Everett Shinn wrote in the same year, ‘The painter’s hardest task is to get the color, the vivacity, the directness of the first sketch into the more ambitious and deliberate finished pictures and Bridgman has satisfied this demand with an unusually slight loss of power’ (E. Shinn, Art Amateur 4, no. 4, March 1881, p. 71).
Chess Players, Biskra is a perfect example of the artist working at the height of his career. The scene is set outside, in a courtyard bathed in the bright clear light of midday. The heat is palpable, and the four figures in the foreground sit on the ground, swathed in their white robes, passing the hottest hours of the day playing a game of chess. The atmosphere is one of heat and stillness; even the horses stand completely still in the shade of a tree. All of this is captured in broad brushstrokes executed in bold slashes of bright red-oranges which emphasize both the heat and the exotic nature of the scene. What Bridgman has reached for, and attained, in Chess Players, Biskra is the warmth, light and mood of a languid afternoon’s pastime in an exotic land.
(fig. 1) Frederick Arthur Bridgman in his studio, circa 1885.