Fidelia Rising

In the years since I wrote my first post on Salem-born artist Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923), she appears to be taking off. Several pieces on her have appeared in various mediums locally, and the Hawthorne Hotel has named its adjacent annex–which happens to be her childhood home– the “Fidelia Bridges Guest House”. One of her more dramatic compositions has inspired an academic article in, of all places, The Journal of the American Medical Association! I’ve been watching her auction prices and they have been rising very dramatically: one watercolor, Songbirds in a Woodland Marsh, fetched $37,000 in a Christie’s auction last spring (against an estimate of $8000-$12,000). While engaging in one of my favorite forms of shopping–browsing lots of upcoming auctions–I found a lovely little cache of Fidelia items in tomorrow’s Swann’s auction, including letters, artwork, and a pencil portrait of her by her friend and fellow artist Oliver Ingraham Lay. It’s nice to see so much appreciation for an orphaned Salem girl who made her own way in the world, albeit with many friends.

Two lots from the Swann Auction Galleries auction tomorrow; Songbirds in a Woodland Marsh (Christie’s) and Bird’s Nest and Ferns, the subject of a recent JAMA article; often classified as a “Brooklynite” because of her long residence there, some of Fidelia’s loveliest paintings are in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, include “Calla Lilly”, 1875; the Fidelia Bridges Guest House of the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem.