Wisteria on a Wall

The practice of drawing and painting in watercolor was an important part of genteel female culture in the nineteenth century. Fidelia Bridges, a Brooklynite, achieved uncommon success as a professional artist, becoming well known for her detailed and decorative watercolors of flowers and birds. Bridges’s close observation of plant life—a subject especially favored by the American Ruskinians—is demonstrated in this carefully articulated study of a sturdy climbing vine, whose sinuous profile was perhaps studied from a window, and in the nearby precise study of a calla lily.