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Fidelia Bridges, The Lonely Painter Who Found Joy in Nature

Fidelia Bridges often felt lonely and sad, but her exquisite paintings convey a lyrical joy in the birds and flowers she loved.

During her lifetime, she was one of the very few women artists who could support herself with her work. Though now largely forgotten, she earned renown among the artists of her time.

Fidelia Bridges limited her subjects to birds and plants, which she rendered with exquisite detail and a poetic sensibility.

She “Paints as if the year were all springtime,” wrote one critic.

Fidelia Bridges

Fidelia Bridges was the daughter of a Salem sea captain who plied the China trade. Like another Salem artist, Frank Benson, she loved the outdoors.

She was born May 19, 1834, to Capt. Henry Gardiner Bridges and Eliza Chadwick Bridges. Her father carried a set of Shakespeare’s works with him on his voyages and was an accomplished carver. He is said to have brought back many curios for what is now the Peabody-Essex Museum. The family lived at 100 Essex Street, now known as the Fidelia Bridges Guest House.

When Fidelia Bridges was 15, her father died while overseas in Whampoa. He was buried in Macao, China. Her mother died three hours before the news of Henry Bridges’ death arrived in Salem.

Fidelia’s oldest sister Eliza taught school and cared for her orphaned younger siblings, including Elizabeth and Henry. Their father’s death forced Eliza to auction the family furniture and move to a smaller house.

Fidelia studied drawing during her convalescence from a long illness. Then, to support herself, she got a job as a mother’s helper to a successful Quaker merchant, William Augustus Brown. Brown moved his family to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Eliza, Elizabeth and Henry followed Fidelia.

Eliza started a school in Brooklyn, but died of tuberculosis after two years. Fidelia and her sister Elizabeth took up the running of the school.

Discovering Art

Fidelia Bridges had befriended Anne Whitney, an acclaimed artist who designed the sculpture of Sam Adams in Boston’s Dock Square. Whitney encouraged her to pursue her art and, with the Browns’ financial help, she studied art in Philadelphia with William Trost Richards. Richards, renowned for his realistic paintings of the White Mountains, took Fidelia under his wing.

She opened her own studio in Philadelphia, and collectors began to buy her work. In 1865 she returned to Brooklyn, establishing a studio on the top floor of the Browns’ house with Anne Whitney and Whitney’s companion, Adeline Manning, a painter from Boston.

At the end of the Civil War, she studied art in Rome for a year. American artists then had to go to Europe to study great works of art because the United States had no public collections. Fidelia traveled with Whitney and Manning, who belonged to actress Charlotte Cushman’s circle of expatriate American women.

Back in the USA

Fidelia returned to the United States in 1868, where she exhibited her watercolors of flowers and birds at the National Academy of Design. She painted some of her best works in Stratford, Conn., where the marshes and meadows along the Housatonic River gave her much to paint.

In 1881, she began working for Louis Prang, the Boston printer who popularized the Christmas card in America. She continued with Prang until 1899. In the meantime, she worked as a governess to Mark Twain’s three children.

By 1890 she was living in Stratford, Conn. Two years later she moved to Canaan, Conn., where she lived in a cottage on a hill that overlooked a stream. Notable American Women, 1607-1950 described her thus:

She soon became a familiar village figure, tall, elegant, beautiful even in her sixties, her hair swept back, her attire always formal, even when sketching in the fields or riding her bicycle through town. Her life was quiet and un-ostentatious, her friends unmarried ladies of refinement and of literary and artistic taste who she joined for woodland picnics and afternoon teas.

She wore black in the winter, gray linen in the summer.

May, courtesy Boston Public Library

She visited her brother Henry in England. He had become a tea-taster in London and collected Asian art. Her paintings developed an Oriental cast, with asymmetrical composition and blank backgrounds.

She died May 14, 1923, and was buried in the Mountain View cemetery in Canaan, where a bird sanctuary was named after her. For years afterward, her friends put wildflowers on her grave on Memorial Day.

In New England, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Peabody Essex Museum and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art exhibit her paintings.

This story about Fidelia Bridges was updated in 2023.

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The Purple Fire Snowstorm of 1853 – 20 Minutes of Terror Downeast

A snowstorm raged for a full day in Downeast Maine on March 13, 1853, when at sundown the winds suddenly grew calm. The snow continued falling steadily, gently down, and the people of Bar Harbor remarked at the stillness as the night sky darkened.

It was not, it turned out, a good sign. It was the start of the purple fire snowstorm of 1853.

Storm-Tossed Ships Wrecked on a Rocky Coast (National Gallery of Art, Johann Christoph Dietzsch)

More than 30 years later, a writer would recall: “I don’t believe there ever was a worse lot of frightened people in the world than the inhabitants of Bar Harbor were that night.”

The signs that something worse was on its way emerged around 7 pm with a rumbling of thunder from the west. Then, as the snow continued, lightning flashes began illuminating the sky.

Purple Fire Snowstorm

The thunder intensified, becoming so strong it rattled the houses. Balls of lightning began streaking down from the sky, rolling along the ground leaving havoc in their wake.

A syndicated account of the storm was carried in newspapers around the country. A correspondent of the Gardiner, Maine, Fountain, writing from Bass Harbor, Mt. Desert, described the storm as ‘awful and sublime.’

“A severe snow storm accompanied by lightning occurred in a part of Maine on the 13th,” wrote the correspondent. “A thunder cloud passed over the place, which, for terrific appearance, exceeded anything ever witnessed here.”

The lightning was purple, he wrote, and sometimes appeared like balls of fire. It came in through windows and doors and down chimneys, while houses trembled and shook to their foundations.

“Mrs. E. Holden was near a window, winding up a clock,” he wrote. “A ball of fire came in through the window and struck her hand, which benumbed her hand and arm. She then, with all in the house, retreated into the entry. Another flash succeeded, and, in the room from which they had retired, resembled a volume of fire, whirling round and producing a crackling noise.”

Many people saw the fire and heard the crackling noises inside their houses, the Fountain reported. Some said the noise sounded like breaking glass.

Injuries, But No Deaths

“Capt. Maurice Rich had his light extinguished, and his wife was injured,” continued the Fountain. “He got his wife on to a bed, and found a match; at that instant another flash came and ignited the match, and threw him several feet backwards.”

A man named John L. Martin received so severe a shock that he could not speak for a long time.

Many people received slight injuries, according to the Fountain.

“Some were struck in the feet, some in the eye; while others were electricized, some powerfully and some lightly,” the newspaper reported. “But what was very singular, not a person was killed or seriously injured, or a building damaged.”

The purple fire snowstorm created a bizarre effect among a cluster of trees, fortunately away from any buildings. The ‘electric fluid’ took them out by the roots and threw them in every direction. Some hung by their roots from the tops of the adjacent trees, their roots up and their tops down.

Truly Awful

The lightning then struck the earth to the depth of several feet and about 10 feet in diameter, and divided into four different directions.

In one direction it made a chasm several feet deep and 370 feet long, ‘lifting, overturning, and throwing out chunks of frozen earth, some of which were 10 or 11 feet long, by 4 feet wide, and hurling at a distance rocks, stones, and roots,’ the Fountain reported.

“The power here displayed was truly awful, and had it fallen on a building, it would have thrown it, with its inmates, into ten thousand fragments,” reported the Fountain.

The purple fire snowstorm also destroyed the masts of several vessels in Southwest Harbor and Northeast Harbor. It knocked down one man, but didn’t kill him.

New England has no shortage of stories about blizzards and storms, as snow is a part of life. And the purple fire snowstorm lasted only about 20 minutes before it pushed out to sea.

It stayed, however, in the memory of the people who witnessed it forever. In 1884, the New York Times published an article recalling the singular purple fire snowstorm of 31 years earlier.

This story about the purple fire snowstorm was updated in 2022.

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Edwin Arlington Robinson, Maine Poet

[jpshare]Something hopeful shines through the dark pessimism of a Christmas poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, who salvaged friendship and fame from bitter failures in his childhood and youth.

The poem is called Karma. It won a Pulitzer in 1925, one of three times the prize would be awarded to Robinson.

Christmas was in the air and all was well
With him, but for a few confusing flaws
In divers of God’s images. Because
A friend of his would neither buy nor sell,
Was he to answer for the axe that fell?
He pondered; and the reason for it was,
Partly, a slowly freezing Santa Claus
Upon the corner, with his beard and bell.

Acknowledging an improvident surprise,
He magnified a fancy that he wished
The friend whom he had wrecked were here again.
Not sure of that, he found a compromise;
And from the fullness of his heart he fished
A dime for Jesus who had died for men.

Many of Robinson’s poems focused on failure, and it isn’t hard to understand why. He was born on Dec. 22, 1869 in Alna, Maine, but his parents moved to Gardiner when he was two. He described his childhood as stark and unhappy. His mother was disappointed he wasn’t a girl. His parents didn’t name him until he was six months old, and then did it by asking a man from Arlington, Mass., to pick a name out of a hat. Even then Robinson hated the name ‘Edwin” as well as the nickname ‘Win.’

His oldest brother Dean, a doctor, became addicted to laudanum. His middle brother Herman married the woman he loved, Emma Shepherd. He boycotted the wedding, and the marriage turned out to be a disaster. Herman turned to drink, suffered business failures and died a pauper.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Edwin Arlington Robinson spent two years at Harvard, where he hoped to be published in a literary magazine but failed. He returned to Gardiner. His father had died and Emma, now a widow, had moved in with the Robinson family. He twice proposed to her and she twice refused. He moved to New York to live the life of an impoverished poet. At 26 he spent $100 to publish his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before. He meant it as a surprise for his mother. She died of diphtheria days before the books arrived.

He had more luck with his second book, The Children of the Night. Kermit Roosevelt read it and recommended it to his father, President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt like it, too, and got Robinson a job at the New York Customs Office, where he had plenty of time to write.

In 1916, an anonymous donor provided him a monthly stipend, which allowed him to continue writing poetry uninterrupted. Poet Amy Lowell gave him a rave review in The New Republic; critic William Stanley Braithwaite had called him ‘America’s foremost poet.’ He began to achieve literary success, winning the Pulitzer Prize three times during the 1920s.

He spent 24 summers at the MacDowell art colony in New Hampshire as an eminence gris. There he had a comfortable routine and the respect and affection of musicians and artists.

Edwin Arlington Robinson died of cancer in 1935.

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