Frederic Clay Bartlett

Miejsce: Chicago

Urodzony: 1873

Śmierć: 1953

Biografia:

Frederic Clay Bartlett was an American artist and art collector known for his collection of French Post-Impressionist and modernist art. Bartlett was committed to promoting the work of fellow contemporary artists and was a founding member of the Arts Club of Chicago, a pioneering organization dedicated to the advancement of modern art.
Bartlett was born in Chicago to Mary Pitkin Bartlett and Adolphus Clay Bartlett, the president of the Hibbard Spencer Bartlett & Company, the company that originated the label True Value. He attended St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire, and the Harvard School for Boys in Chicago. However, at the age of nineteen, instead of pursuing a college degree, Bartlett left Chicago to study art in Europe.
Bartlett attributed the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 as his main source of inspiration regarding fine art. In 1894, Bartlett, along with fellow Chicagoan, Robert Allerton, would be admitted to the Royal Academy in Munich, an honor that very few Americans would earn. It was during his time in Germany that Bartlett would meet Dora Tripp from White Plains, New York, the woman that would eventually become his wife. In 1896, after completing their studies in Munich, Allerton and Bartlett would study under masters Aman-Jean and Collin during their enrollment at Ecole Collin. They would study drawing under Collin and Painting under Aman-Jean for two years while in Paris.
On October 4, 1898, Bartlett and Tripp would get married in upstate New York and spend the next year in Paris, studying under American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler's art school. After Whistler's school closed, Bartlett enhanced his painting prowess by studying mural art with the direction of French master, Puvis de Chavannes. The following year, Bartlett and his wife would return to Munich to complete his art education.
In 1900, at the age of twenty-seven, Bartlett moved to Chicago where he rented a studio in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. It was here that he received his first commissioned piece of art, a portrait that he was paid $75 upon its completion. An active and successful painter, Bartlett was committed to promoting the work of fellow contemporary artists, beginning in 1905, as a member of the Art Institute's Art Committee, and later, in 1916, as a founding member of the Arts Club of Chicago, a pioneering organization dedicated to the advancement of modern art.
In 1902, the Bartletts moved into their new home at 2901 Prairie Avenue, Chicago. This home, designed by Frost & Granger, would be named "Dorfred House", a combination of the names Dora and Fred. Constructed just two blocks away from his boyhood home on historic Prairie Avenue, the home boasted a studio measuring forty feet by twenty-five feet with a twenty foot high ceiling. Beyond the studio, the home offered a reception room known as the Pompeian Room, an Italian music room and library on the first floor with the kitchen, a Louis XVI dining room, laundry and servants rooms in the basement along with the upstairs private chambers, including bedrooms and powder rooms.
During his marriage to Dora, Bartlett was more active with his creativity regarding art, especially the creation of murals. In 1900, he was commissioned to create a mural for the Second Presbyterian Church in Chicago. After a fire destroyed the church, Bartlett and his friend, Howard Van Doren Shaw, integrated frescoes depicting the Tree of Life and a Heavenly Choir painted in the Byzantine manner. Bartlett followed this mural with a more personal endeavor in 1904. He completed a frieze in stained-glass depicting a medieval tournament procession for the Frank Dickinson Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium on the campus of the University of Chicago. The gym was a memorial to Bartlett's younger brother, Frank, who died of an appendicitis in 1900. Bartlett's father, Adolphus funded the construction of the facility while being a trustee for the university. An additional work by Bartlett, completed in 1909, were individual paintings that covered over fifty ceiling panels of the Michigan Room in the University Club of Chicago.
On March 3, 1917, Bartlett's wife, Dora, died after nineteen years of marriage. Prior to Dora's death, Bartlett's son, Frederic Clay Bartlett Jr., was born on November 20, 1907. Bartlett Jr., who would be known as "Clay", would grow-up and become a talented artist and musician, however; he would unfortunately die at the age of forty-eight in 1955, only two years after the death of his father.
On January 22, 1919, Bartlett would marry his second wife, Helen Louise Birch, a close friend of Dora. Birch, born February 27, 1883, was thirty-six years old, compared to her husband who was forty-five. Prior to her marriage, Helen Birch was both a published composer and poet. She studied music with the German expatriate Bernhard Ziehn, a music theorist and teacher of harmony and composition in Chicago. She was an avid supporter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago-based Poetry magazine. Helen Birch was the daughter of Maria Root Birch and Hugh Taylor Birch. After the Great Chicago Fire, Hugh Birch became a named partner in the law firm of Galt, Birch and Galt. In 1872, he would become the first State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois and eventually move to the area that currently is Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

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