page_title: Charles Bridges (painter)
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Bridges (painter) / Life and career
context_page_description: Charles Bridges was an English painter and missionary active in Virginia from 1735 to 1744. He is the first documented painter known to have worked in Virginia.
context_section_description: Bridges was christened in the parish of Barton Seagrave in Northamptonshire, and was the son of John Bridges and Elizabeth Trumbull Bridges.  His family was of the gentry, and was well-educated; a brother, John Bridges, was a barrister and well-regarded historian of Northamptonshire.  He married Alice Flower on August 4, 1687, at Saint Marylebone, near London; the couple had at least three children, a son and two daughters. Bridges was a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, having worked for the organization in London from 1699 to 1713 and serving for a time as a liaison to local charity schools. Just when Bridges became a painter is unknown, though it is assumed that he had some training. Only one portrait is firmly documented dating to before his sojourn in Virginia; it depicts Thomas Baker, a fellow of Saint John's College, University of Cambridge, and was painted sometime after 1717. It is today in the collection of the University of Oxford.
  Bridges contemplated moving to Georgia in 1733; he is likely to have been a widower by that point, as men of his age seldom considered emigrating to the colonies. Nevertheless, he came to Virginia with his children, arriving in Williamsburg in 1735 armed with letters of introduction to James Blair and lieutenant governor William Gooch.  Soon he met William Byrd II, with whom he lived for a period at Westover Plantation while painting the Byrd children; family tradition states that Byrd met Bridges in England, in the studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, but this has not been substantiated. Byrd wrote on his behalf to Alexander Spotswood, describing him as "a man of a good family," who was forced "either by the frowns of fortune, or his own mismanagement," to work as a painter; the planter further commented that Bridges, though he might "have not the Masterly Hand of a Lilly, or a Kneller, yet had he lived so long ago as when places were given to the most Deserving, he might have pretended to be the Sergeant-Painter of Virginia."  With Blair and Edmund Gibson (who with Thomas Gooch had provided one of his letters of introduction to the colony), Bridges discussed the possibility of establishing a charity to teach Christianity to Virginia's African-American community. The endeavor came to nothing, likely because Christianity was associated in the minds of many local planters with the notion of freedom, and because Blair and Bridges lacked the energy necessary to see the project through.
  Bridges remained friendly with Byrd, being mentioned in his diaries as a visitor to Westover twice, in August 1739 and January 1740. He was one of the witnesses to the will of Sir John Randolph in 1735. One of his daughters died in Williamsburg on August 24, 1736; that December, he rented a house in town for the duration of a year. He then moved to Hanover County, where he stayed until returning to England, sometime around 1744.  He died in his native Northamptonshire, and is buried in the church of Warkton. Descendants of the painter have been traced in the United States.
  It has been suggested that Bridges' decision to return to England may have served as a prompt for William Dering to begin portrait painting, and some historians have surmised that Dering purchased painting supplies from Bridges prior to the latter's departure.
caption: Alexander Spotswood, 1736, oil on canvas, hanging in the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg
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