To celebrate her birthday this month, her chromolithograph for May is illustrated (Illus. Her first project for him was an exquisite sequence of twelve pictures of birds and flowers referencing the changing faces of nature over the course of a year. (Like вЂњgoogleвЂќ in our day, вЂњchromoвЂќ was so common it came to be used as a verb.)ДЇidelia Bridges, May. Soon the Boston-based lithographer Louis Prang took notice of her work, realizing that her subtle use of color and design was perfectly suited to reproduction via his new color printing method.В Like Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and other well known artists of the day, she accepted his offer to вЂњchromoвЂќ her pictures.

One success followed the next, and she was invited to exhibit her work at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. For instance, one of her most popular pictures gave a group of swallows perched upon sprays of wild grass growing in a sandy waste. They are simple in subject also, and their story is always interesting. Her pictures are of medium size and possess a delightful gray tone, very suggestive of nature. Miss Bridges is unquestionably one of the most successful of our local artistsвЂ¦.Her pictures appear to have struck the popular fancy, and as a natural result, she has enjoyed a busy as well as a profitable year. A review in The Brooklyn EagleВ (July 30, 1874, p.3) confirmed: She complained, in fact, of feeling вЂњlike a machine,вЂќ churning out work. Her artworks of the 1870s seemed to fly off her easel, finding purchasers as fast as she could produce them.

Oliver Ingraham Lay, Portrait of Fidelia Bridges.

1) that reveals her fine features and sensitive expression. To mark the occasion her friend Oliver Ingraham Lay painted her portrait to be donated to the Academy, and a few years later drew another likeness in pencil (Illus. Nearing her fiftieth birthday in Spring 1873 she was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design, joining Eliza Greatorex* as the only female members of that prestigious association. Benjamin credited her вЂњwith developing a charming and original branch of art:вЂќ watercolors in which вЂњshe composes stalks of grain or wild-flowers in combination with field birds, meadow-larks, linnets, bobolinks, sparrows, or sand-pipers.вЂќДЇrom her debut at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1862, she created about a thousand pictures. In his influential book Art in AmericaВ (1880), critic S.G.W. Under the tutelage of William Trost Richards she first created detailed renderings of small corners of nature in oil on canvas, and later transitioned to watercolor. A native of Salem, Massachusetts, Fidelia Bridges (1834вЂ“1923) forged an artistic career that spanned a record fifty years, longer than that of most of her male contemporaries. On this day-May 19th-in 1834 the best-selling female artist and illustrator in post-Civil War United States was born. Guest post by Katherine Manthorne, The Graduate Center, CUNY

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