Frederic Arthur Bridgman was born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1847. He and his family later moved to New York where he had the opportunity to pursue his artistic interests. He was mainly known as an American Orientalist painter spending the 1870s and 1880s traveling in Spain and North Africa. He was one of the first American students of the famous French history and genre painter Jean-Leon Gerome.

In the 1890s Bridgman’s interest laid solely in portraits, the occasional symbolist theme, and landscapes. In the Cove, c. 1895 depicts a fishing schooner along a quiet rock-bound coastline. The scene includes a few buildings and a line of hills in the distance. The clear, distinct details, contrasts and reflections in the mirror-like water below are indicative of the transparent effects he used in photographs of everyday scenery.