By Jerry Tallmer

God made little apples, and followed that up with Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who declared: “With an apple I will astonish Paris.” And followed that up with Harriet Bridgeman, creator of a no less astonishing archive — the London-based Bridgeman Art Library — in which Cezanne’s apples are kept company by 200,000 other images of paintings, sculpture, architecture, furniture, and what have you from 15,000 B.C. right up to now, all accessible on a single Website.

It was in 1972, as a writer, editor, and new mother, that Viscountess Bridgeman — for she is that too — first saw the need for such a collection.

She’d been working for the prestigious Sir John Rothenstein, director of Landon’s Tate Gallery — “a fascinating man,” she says. “ who was friends with Picasso and all the other movers and shakers of his time.” Sir John had been asked to edit a weekly series The Masters, “And I was his deputy,” she said one recent afternoon from London.

“And from there I went to two years of editing Discovering Antiques, a heavily illustrated weekly with tight deadlines. It was in that capacity that I realized how museums and galleries were not making the most of their materials, especially in the matter of access to their works. Which meant museums were losing money they could have been making.”

The Bridgeman Art Library, then, is a vast cyberspace multitude of photographic transparencies offering instant access across the whole spectrum of artists, authors, scholars, researchers, designers, advertising people, corporations, filmmakers, and any and all other subscribers (or licensees) — yes, and librarians too. “We now represent 95 percent of British Museums, and many museums in America,” she said with reserved pride.

She was born Victoria Harriet Lucy Turton, at a date she prefers to skip, one of the four daughters of Ralph (pronounced Rafe) and Mary Turton of County Durham, in the North of England. “My father was a solicitor and in local politics — an independent really. My mother is 97 now. She was always interested in the history of art, and I majored in that at Trinity College, Dublin,” following on the heels of earlier education by governess at home.

Do you, yourself paint or sculpt, Mrs. Bridgeman?

“Sadly, no.”

In 1966, at the marriage of one of her sisters, she met a man named Robin Bridgeman. “He was still unmarried at age 35 — didn’t cave in until then.” They got married that same year. “And I still have a husband, which is rather unfashionable these days,” she said with a little laugh.

Robin Bridgeman, as it happens, is Viscount Bridgeman, the third Viscount of that name. “It’s an inherited title,” Her husband is a financier, and is the conservative Whip in the House of Lords, one of the 42 survivors of Tony Blair’s winnowing of the life peerages. The Bridgemans are the parents of three sons — Luke, Edmond, and Orlando.

When she started her Art Library in 1972, “We’d just bought a very large house in Sloane Square” — terrain of the Royal Court Theater — “and the British Printing Corp backed us to a staff of 16 people in that house. And in between there was a nanny and a baby. We subsequently moved to Notting Hill and the Library kept expanding. It’s now in a big new building near Notting Hill Gate, with a staff of 60, plus eight people at our branch in New York, eleven people in Paris, five people in Berlin, and 72 agents for marketing and sales around the world.”

The Bridgemans also have a house in the country, plus a house in Greece to which they repair occasionally. Harriet Bridgeman still works full time at the Library, and along the way ahs put together an amusing and scary anthology, The Last Word.

Deathbed Farewells by the Famous and Infamous Throughout History—and also to write a book about something she knows about, The British Eccentric.

And are you eccentric, she was asked.

Brief silence. Then: “Being British gives one the freedom to be what one wants to be.”

You can bet God’s little apples on that.

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