Swallows

Date1873

DimensionsFramed: 19 × 14 3/4 × 2 3/8 in. (48.3 × 37.5 × 6 cm) Sight: 11 3/4 × 8 in. (29.8 × 20.3 cm)

Object numberN0001.2025(01)

Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Museum purchase.

Label TextIn 1860, Bridges enrolled in painting classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and studied with William Trost Richards. He went on to help her set up her own Philadelphia studio in 1862, introduced her to his patrons, and encouraged her to exhibit her work. An increasingly prolific artist, Bridges would execute several hundred pictures during her fifty-year career. The same year she painted Swallows she was elected into the National Academy of Design and the following year she became the only women of seven artists in the American Watercolor Society.

This work was previously owned by the artist Sanford Robinson Gifford and was displayed prominently in his Hudson, New York home.
Exhibition History(Possibly) "American Society of Painters in Water Colors," National Academy of Design, New York, NY, February - March 1873, no. 132 as "Snow Birds"

(Possibly) Union League Club of New York, New York, NY, May 28, 1974, no. 4 as "Snow Birds"

"American Masterworks on Paper," Hirschl and Adler Galleries, New York, NY, 1985 - 86, p. 17, no. 11, ill.

"True to Nature: 19th Century American Landscape Studies," Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New London, CT, 1994, no. 12

On View

Not on view