Eleanor Bridges

Eleanor Massey Bridges (born December 16, 1899 in Columbus, Georgia; died June 5, 1987 in Birmingham) was a civic activist and artist.

Bridges was born to Richard and Bessie Spencer Massey. Her father was the founder of the Massey Business College. The family moved to Birmingham when she was a few months old, and she grew up, with eight siblings, in the Richard Massey residence on Red Mountain. (The house was later demolished for the Elton B. Stephens Expressway)

Eleanor decided as a child to pursue a career as an artist. She took lessons from local artists and continued at the Ogontz School for Young Ladies in Abington, Pennsylvania, where, for a year, she was the roommate of Amelia Earhart. On a whim, she joined a suffragists' parade in Philadelphia, missing an appointment with her school chaperone. The incident led to her expulsion.

At the age of 19 she met World War I veteran and aspiring sculptor Georges Bridges and was engaged to him within a week (against the wishes of her father). They were married at her family house in front of friends while the family remained upstairs. They bought a pink stucco house on Edgewood Boulevard where he began to sculpt, soon winning prizes and commissions. Soon the couple moved to Paris and circulated in the expatriate community there, which included Tallulah Bankhead, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They later lived in Greece, Turkey and Mallorca.

In 1928 the Bridgeses, now with their daughter, London, returned to Birmingham on a freighter, via Cuba. They had not intended to stay, but, when the Great Depression came, they adopted several children who had been abandoned at mining towns in the district. Over the next decade as many as fifteen children lived with them in dormitories added on to the house. No formal adoption papers were filed and most of the children returned to their families when the economy recovered. In the winters the whole family decamped to Mexico where they kept a studio and enrolled the children in local schools. Later they used the same rooms to house recovering alcoholics under a local doctor's care.

The Bridges' parlor was a landmark in the progressive social and cultural scene, especially after performances at the Little Theatre. The gardens surrounding the house were filled with trees, flowers and fountains. When Carmen Miranda made platform shoes famous, she began buying them. To Georges' eye they gave her petite 5'-3" frame "a better line", so she turned to having them custom made when they later fell out of fashion.

Bridges gave up her studio there to spend more time in Birmingham in the 1950s, joining several civic boards. She was an officer of the Birmingham Beautification Board, the Women's Civic Club, the Birmingham Festival of Arts, and the Birmingham Art Association. She was named Birmingham Woman of the Year in 1954 and inducted into the Birmingham Post-Herald's "Roll of Honor". She was intending for her period of civic work to be short-lived, but found the work engrossing and unending. When Georges fell ill in 1975, she resigned many of her positions to care for him.

Throughout her life, Bridges was a prolific painter, most known for her portraits of dogs, including "Liberty", owned by President Gerald Ford. Her dog portraits were collected for the "Dog Daze" tour, which was exhibited around the state during the American Revolution Bicentennial, including the Birmingham Museum of Art. She donated a portion of her commissions to animal welfare charities. In her later work, she took care to use archival-quality materials and painted strictly in oils, with an eye toward the longevity of her artwork.

Always interested in academics, Bridges frequently took classes at area colleges. In 1977 she enrolled in the general studies program at Samford University to complete her degree. She was a frequent public lecturer and taught a UAB Special Studies course called "More Power to You", aimed at helping older women further themselves as individuals. Bridges was also a collector of antique hats, an active gardner, and a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Bridges died in 1987. She was survived by her three siblings and her daughter, London.

References

• "Portrait of an Artist: Eleanor Bridges" (c. 1976), unknown publication, clipping from oral history supplemental materials
• Barton, Olivia (November 20, 1978) "Age only improves people like me." Birmingham News
• "At 80, painter begins cyclorama" (January 1983) Birmingham Post-Herald
• "Service tomorrow for cyclorama artist." (June 9, 1987) Birmingham Post-Herald