Fidelia Bridges

Still Life, 1870. Fidelia Bridges. Oil on canvas. Purchase, John Osgood and Elizabeth Amis Cameron Blanchard Memorial Fund, 2023.
One of few American women to become a prominent professional artist during the Civil War period, Bridges enjoyed a successful fifty-year career. She was known for meticulously detailed watercolor renderings of flora and fauna in close-up, outdoor settings and was skilled at capturing quiet moments in nature. Bridges, a student of William Trost Richards at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, embraced his Ruskinian ‘truth to nature’ approach to great effect.

Bridges’ oil paintings are far rarer than her watercolors, and mostly date to the 1860s. This example, from 1870, marks a transitional moment in her career, as she would soon turn to watercolor almost exclusively. The oil’s freshness—the seemingly just-picked violets and ferns bear a trace of brown earth—exemplifies Bridges’ commitment to depicting natural elements with immediacy and intimacy, what Richards described as ‘the voice of nature speaking in the idiom of art.’