This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Fidelia Bridges was 16 years old in 1850, when she learned that her father, a ship’s captain, had died of yellow fever while traveling in China. Just three hours earlier, her mother had died at home.
At the time, Fidelia and her three siblings were living in the port city of Salem, Mass., but she became so sick from the stress of the news — suffering from loss of appetite, debilitating exhaustion and a persistent cough — that she accepted an invitation to spend time with family friends in the country, where she could recuperate. While there, she spent hours in bed drawing, and her artistic talents became apparent.
Once she recovered, she returned to Salem, where she lived with an aunt and took art classes. As she had no inheritance or husband, she intended to teach art for a living. Instead, she became famous for her own works of art — watercolors of nature scenes that were displayed in homes across the country, published in books and used on greeting cards.
Bridges was the rare 19th-century woman to transform what had been regarded as a domestic hobby into a respectable, profitable profession.
At the height of her career, her work was seen as equal to that of Winslow Homer, one of the most famous American painters of the day; some even regarded it as superior. Henry James, reviewing her paintings on display at the American Watercolor Society’s 1875 exhibition for The Galaxy, an arts and literature magazine, said they were “infinitely finer and more intellectual” than Homer’s.
