Rooftops, Brooklyn

Better known for her intimate nature studies, this rare urban watercolor—along with Garden View—dates from Bridges’ residency in the Brooklyn home of shipowner William August Brown and his family, for whom she had first worked as a governess, in Salem, Massachusetts, following the deaths of her parents in her teens. Bridges maintained a lifelong friendship with the family, accompanying them to Brooklyn in 1854.


In 1860, the Browns made it financially possible for Bridges to study with William Trost Richards at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she embraced his Ruskinian ‘truth to nature’ approach to great effect. In 1862, she established her own studio in Philadelphia. She returned the following year to Brooklyn, where the Browns provided her with a studio on the top floor of their brownstone at 93 1st Place, in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood. It was in that studio where she produced Rooftops.


This compositionally inventive and fluidly painted watercolor from early in her career exemplifies Bridges’ impressive facility with the watercolor medium and exquisite sensitivity to its distinctive qualities. Its acquisition reveals a little known aspect of her oeuvre—city scenes that were unusual for women artists in the 1860s, much less for men, who did not fully embrace such subjects until the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, when urban realists, later dubbed the Ashcan group, made it their artistic focus.