| George Bridgman | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1865 |
| Died | 1943 (aged 77–78) New York City |
| Nationality | Canadian American |
| Field | Painting, art education, anatomy, figure drawing |
| Training | École des Beaux-Arts |
| Influenced by | Jean-Léon Gérôme, Gustave Boulanger |
| Influenced | Norman Rockwell and many others |
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.
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.[1]
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Artists who studied with Bridgman include: McClelland Barclay, Gifford Beal, Dane Chanase, Chon Day, Will Eisner, Seymour Foge, 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, and Stanley Maxwell Zuckerberg.
Jackson Pollock's sketchpad features work from Bridgman's books.
Many of Bridgman's standard books on anatomy for artists are still in print via Dover Publications.