Frederick Arthur Bridgman declared at the age of five that he had decided to be an artist, and at sixteen he left school to become a banknote engraver in New York. This job soon bored him, however, and in 1866 he traveled to Paris to study with the painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts. Bridgman spent his summers in an American artists’ colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany, where he painted images of the local people and landscape. In 1873 he journeyed to northern Africa and sailed up the Nile, creating hundreds of sketches and collecting artifacts and costumes. His images of exotic people and cultures fascinated Americans and Europeans during the 1880s, and Bridgman created many more “Oriental” paintings from memory, inspired by his large collection of Egyptian and Algerian souvenirs
