Bristol received his first instruction in the Hudson, New York studio of landscape painter, Henry Ary. He is then said to have eschewed further formal training, choosing instead to learn from the direct observation of nature. Other than an excursion in 1859 or, more likely, 1860, to Florida to experience and sketch its tropical scenery, he largely confined his ranging in person and subject matter to the landscape of New York State, Western Massachusetts and Vermont. On at least one of his summer tours in search of subject matter he was in Canada; his Lake Memphremagog received an award in the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. This may have been the same work exhibited as Lake Memphremagog, Canada in the Academy annual of 1888.
Although he showed his work in other cities, Bristol was very much a part of the New York art community. He first exhibited in an Academy annual in 1858, and was represented in every annual thereafter through the year of his death. He was a member of the Artists' Fund Society and the Century Association, and exhibited in the shows presented by both organizations. Other than in 1858, when he gave a Brooklyn address in the annual exhibition catalogue, and 1862 when he listed himself as addressed in Hillsdale, he was based in New York. From the mid-1870s he kept his studio in the near neighborhood of the Academy's Twenty-third Street building; where he would have attended meetings the years he was a member of the Council, 1880-81, and 1889 to 1892.
