[4] After she regained her health, Fidelia became a live-in mother's helper in the household of William Augustus Brown, a Quaker who had been a Salem ship-holder before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where he became a successful wholesale produce merchant.

In 1860,[5] after being inspired by her friend Anne Whitney, she enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia with William Trost Richards and became very close to his family.

Having remained friends with the Richards family, she accompanied them to Lake George and Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania and New Jersey on sketching trips.

[7] In 1865, Bridges left Philadelphia and established a studio on the top floor of the Browns' house in Brooklyn,[5] where Anne Whitney also worked and lived with her companion Adeline Manning, a painter from Boston.

[7] After the American Civil War she studied for a year[2] in Rome and lived and traveled with Adeline Manning and Anne Whitney.

Her pictures, however, were not mere photographic reproductions of what she saw; with the imagination of the true artist, she infused her subjects with a deep poetic meaning.

[2][5] One of her favored sites was Stratford, Connecticut, where she enjoyed the wildflowers and other subject matter in the area's flats and meadows.

The birds found in the green salt grass lined banks of the Housatonic River were also of interest.

Her works, which reflected an Oriental aesthetic with plain background and asymmetrical compositions, were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.

[10] After her extended visit to England, Bridges returned to the Browns home, where she continued to work and live much of the time.

[5] Bridges exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

[7] She moved to Canaan, Connecticut in 1892 and lived in a cottage on a hill, overlooking a stream and with a beautiful flower garden that attracted birds and became the subject of many paintings.

[7] She soon became a familiar village figure, tall, elegant, beautiful even in her sixties, her hair swept back, her attire always formal, even when sketching in the fields or rider her bicycle through town.

Her life was quiet and un-ostentatious, her friends unmarried ladies of refinement and of literary and artistic task who she joined for woodland picnics and afternoon teas.Along with artist Howard Pyle, Bridges became a sustaining member of the American Forestry Association, which was founded to protect forests in the United States following "an eloquent plea" from President Theodore Roosevelt.