American Painting and Sculpture

FREDERICK ARTHUR BRIDGMAN
(American, 1847-1928)

Funeral of a Mummy, 1876-77
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mr. Wendell Cherry 1990.8

During the 1860s, Alabama-born poet and artist Frederick Arthur Bridgman studied at the Brooklyn Art Studio and the National Academy of Design in New York. By the age of nineteen, he left for France, a move that monumentally affected his art and career. In Paris, Bridgman trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts with the renowned painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, who inspired his pupils with his sweeping, romantic history paintings that often captured classical subjects and the exoticism of North Africa.

Bridgman first traveled to North Africa and Spain in 1872 and subsequently captured his impressions of ancient Egyptian culture and burial rites in Funeral of a Mummy. In this painting, which is strongly reminiscent of Gérôme’s works, Bridgman depicted an elaborate funeral party crossing the Nile in meticulous detail. Here, graceful boats transport both the dead and the grieving to the final burial site, perhaps Luxor, where high-ranking citizens were interred. Bridgman was awarded a third-class medal for this work at the 1877 Paris Salon, where critics praised the painting’s “archeological correctness” and scenic landscape in the background.