Frederick Arthur Bridgman

Sale: Sotheby's, New York, 24 October 1996, lot 92

Galerie Nataf, Paris

Purchased from the above by the present owner

On the Terrace epitomizes Bridgman’s vivid, sun-filled Algerian canvases. Bridgman arrived in Paris from America in 1866, entering the studio of Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he honed his skills and under whose tutelage he developed the pictorial idiom exemplified in paintings like the present work. After a trip to Algeria and Egypt in 1872, Bridgman turned his attention to North African subjects. On the Terrace was painted soon after that first journey, the warm colours and bright fabrics, and the scene itself - of two women relaxing on a rooftop patio overlooking the whitewashed skyline of Algiers below - a reflection of Bridgman's fascination with, and empathy towards, the culture he experienced there.

As the years went by, Bridgman spent ever more time in Algiers, even putting his wife and children up in the Hôtel de l’Orient in the Mustapha Supérieur quarter, and hiring a guide, Belkassem, to find him an entrée into private houses in which, and from which, to watch and paint daily life. From Algiers he wrote home: ‘Here we have all the advantages of civilization with quite enough in the picture line for anybody.’ True to his academic training, Bridgman’s finished paintings were worked up from sketches made on the spot, and the present work would have been no exception. A New York show of over three hundred of his works at the American Art Gallery in 1881 included finished canvases, but the major part of the exhibition consisted of sketches, praised for their ‘frankness, their fidelity, their freshness, their beauty.’

Bridgman’s cumulative experiences in Algeria and his prolific output led him in 1888 to publish a long and richly illustrated account of his stay in Algiers in Harper’s Monthly Magazine; the success of this series of articles led to the contract for a book, Winters in Algiers, illustrated with woodcuts after the artist’s drawings and paintings.