George Bridgman

For other people named George Bridgeman, see George Bridgeman (disambiguation).

George Bridgman
Born	1865 (1865)
Died	1943 (aged 77–78) New York City
Nationality	Canadian American
Education	École des Beaux-Arts
Known for	Painting, art education, anatomy, figure drawing

George Brant Bridgman (1865–1943) was a Canadian-American painter, writer, and teacher in the fields of anatomy and figure drawing. Bridgman taught anatomy for artists at the Art Students League of New York for some 45 years.

Life and Work

In his youth, Bridgman studied the arts under painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and later with Gustave Boulanger. For most of his life Bridgman lived in New York where he taught anatomy and figure drawing at the Art Students League of New York. Among his many thousands of students were the American cartoonist Will Eisner and Norman Rockwell; in his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, Rockwell spoke highly of Bridgman. His successor at Art Students League was Robert Beverly Hale.

Bridgman used box forms to represent the major masses of the figure (head, thorax, and pelvis) which he would tie together with gestural lines and produce to create "wedges" or simplified interconnecting forms of the body.

Notable students

Artists who studied with Bridgman include: Frank J. Reilly, McClelland Barclay, Emily Newton Barto, C. C. Beall, Gifford Beal, Dane Chanase, Richard V. Culter, Chon Day, Will Eisner, Elias Goldberg, Robert Beverly Hale, Clark Hulings, Jack Kamen, Deane Keller, Andrew Loomis, Anita Malfatti, Paul Manship, Peter Max, Frank McCarthy, Earl Moran, Kimon Nicolaïdes, Corrado Parducci, Ulysses Ricci, Norman Rockwell, Ernie Schroeder, Archie Boyd Teater, John Vassos, Edmund Ward, Franklin Brooke Voss, Bessie Callender, and Lorenzo Homar.

Jackson Pollock's sketchpad features work from Bridgman's books.

Works

Many of Bridgman's books standards on anatomy for artists, are still in print via Dover Publications.

• Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing From Life
• Constructive Anatomy
• The Human Machine
• Bridgman's Life Drawing
• Heads, Features and Faces
• The Book of a Hundred Hands

Honours

• Royal Canadian Academy of Arts

External links

• Drawings from George Bridgman's 1911 Art Class
• Amazon.com Books by Bridgman
• Art Students League of New York
• Dover Publications