These words of the greatest art critic of modern times have been the inspiration of Mr. Bridgman’s work ever since, as a youth of nineteen, he commenced his artistic career as draughtsman in the American Bank Note Company, of New York. After six months’ experience in this department he was transferred to the vignette department, where he displayed the same fidelity and ability which has ever characterized his work. His hours were from nine until five, but he rose at four and painted until eight each morning and each evening he returned to his home to paint until a late hour. Occupying, as he now does, the enviable position of being a medallist of the Paris Salon several times over, not to mention medals from Münich, London and Berlin and the decoration of the Cross of the Legion of Honor and similar honors, Mr. Bridgman owes his eminence as much to his indefatigable work and his determination as to his talent. There have been artists distinguished from the fact that their genius was bizarre or their point of view extraordinary, and others preëminent because they solved, with the ease of genius, the general problems of their art. It is to the latter class that this Southern painter belongs—the class which expresses clearly and forcefully the essential life elements, in contradistinction to the eccentric, exaggerated striving after the weird, which marks the work of the others, whose success is at best, ephemeral. There is contained in a picture nothing less than all that it is capable of inspiring to our thoughts and imagination. Art, like nature, can only show us what we are capable of seeing and it is this faculty for showing not only the subtle sense of atmosphere to the critics but the beauty of life to all observers, which marks Mr. Bridgman’s pictures. Mr. Bridgman’s studies in Paris were made at the celebrated Suisse atelier and at the Ecôle des Beaux Arts, under Gérôme. He painted in Brittany several years, and in 1872 he went to Algeria, where the beauty of the African scenes inspired him to write, as well as to paint. His _Winters in Algeria_, illustrated with his own sketches, was brought out by a leading American publishing house and was pronounced by Sir Lambert Playfair, thirty years British Consul at Algiers, to be the best book ever issued on this subject. His _Burial of a Mummy on the Nile_, painted in Africa, is owned by James Gordon Bennett. It was this picture which brought him the Cross of the Legion of Honor, as well as a medal, when exhibited at the Paris Exposition, 1878. At the second Exposition, held in 1889, he was made President of the American Section of Fine Arts. Other paintings owned by Americans are _The Family Bath_, in Mrs. Ayres’ gallery in New York, and _The Procession of the Sacred Bull Apis_, in the Corcoran Gallery, at Washington. [Illustration: MR. F. A. BRIDGMAN]