America’s best known Orientalist painter, Bridgeman went to Paris in 1866 and became a pupil of Jean-Leon Gérôme. He visited Egypt in 1873-1874, a trip which provided him with important inspiration and critical success for the pictures of the East which it inspired. His Paris Salon exhibit in 1877 The Funeral Procession of a Mummy on the Nile, bought by James Gordon Bennett, brought him the Cross of the Legion d’Honneur. He regularly exhibited during his lifetime at the Paris Salon, the Royal Academy, London and in the USA.
