Frederick Arthur Bridgman was born in Tuskegee, Alabama as a result of his father’s brief professional posting as a doctor there. Shortly after the untimely death of his father when Bridgman was three, his mother moved her young family back to Boston, and later to Brooklyn, New York. Bridgman’s artistic leanings were apparent from an early age and he first put his skills as a draughtsman to use as an apprentice engraver at the American Banknote Company. He was so keen to become an artist that he would get up at four o’clock every morning to paint before heading off to work at the banknote company. Before long, he had enlisted a group of Brooklyn businessmen to support the furtherance of his training in Paris.

Bridgman spent the summers of 1866 and 1867 in Pont-Aven, Brittany where, under the influence of the Philadelphia artist Robert Wylie, he painted rustic landscapes and peasant subjects. But this early trajectory was to change for good soon after being admitted to the Paris atelier of the eminent Orientalist, Jean-Léon Gérôme. He remained in Gérôme’s atelier for four years and became one of his favorite students. Through this invaluable connection, Bridgman began selling paintings through Gérôme’s dealer Goupil and exhibiting at the Paris Salon.

Bridgman’s first taste of Africa came when he and an unidentified English artist traveled from Spain to Tangier in the winter of 1872-73, which Bridgman described as “a real Arab city, picturesque to any degree but a wretched place to live except in fine weather.” The pair of artists continued on to Algiers that winter where, Bridgman wrote, “we have all the advantages of civilization with quite enough in the picture line for anybody.”

The following year, Bridgman traveled to Egypt with his fellow expatriate artist, Charles Sprague Pearce, a student of Léon Bonnat. They settled in Cairo where Bridgman focused, as in Algiers, on capturing contemporary life – the distinctive people and places of those exotic places. He returned to Paris with several hundred sketches, studies and accessories and rented a studio in which, with Gérôme’s encouragement, Bridgman embarked on several ambitious paintings, the first of which, Funeral of a Mummy, was shown to great acclaim at the Salon of 1877. His fast-developing reputation and financial success was complemented by a marriage to an affluent Bostonian, Florence Mott Baker. In 1881, he had a one-man exhibition at the American Art Gallery in New York, which included hundreds of sketches which one reviewer complimented for their “frankness, fidelity, their freshness, their beauty.”

Various circumstances, including his wife’s frail health, led to several extended visits to Algiers in the later 1880s. Bridgman wrote a series of articles for Harper’s Monthly Magazine which culminated in the publication of his sumptuously illustrated book Winters in Algeria in 1889. Bridgman was at his artistic peak and thriving on the plethora of visual stimuli which Algiers provided him – it looked, he wrote, “like a great irregular stair-way of terraces, blind and blank under the sunshine.” While “working on one of these terraces one afternoon,” he wrote, he was “completely surrounded and enveloped in whites – yellow, gray, blue, green, and pink whites – delicious whites in shadow, of those refined tones so terrible to do justice to on canvas, and with which one must wrestle.” [Frederick Arthur Bridgman, Winters in Algeria, New York, 1889, p. 23].