Clarence D. Bartlett

Small Talk
c. 1896
Oil on Canvas
24 x 30

Clarence Drew Bartlett (b.1863-?)

A native of Athens, Ohio, Clarence Drew Bartlett was an excellently trained portrait and
landscape painter who achieved international acclaim for his work during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Bartlett studied in Cincinnati before moving to
New York City where he studied for several years under William Merritt Chase and
others during the early 1880s. According to an article in the Cincinnati Graphic, he
returned to Cincinnati and opened a studio there in the fall of 1884 but he remained in
Cincinnati for only a short period before departing for Europe where he studied and
worked for many years before returning to New York sometime during the first decade of
the twentieth century. In Paris he studied with Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Leon Gerome
and Jules Lefebre and in Munich he was a pupil of Franz von Lenbach in Munich.

During the 1890s, Bartlett worked for several years in the Netherlands where he
achieved fame as a landscape and animal painter. He was invited to join the Royal
Dutch Society of Artists and was an active member of that organization for several
years before relocating in England sometime before the turn of the twentieth century.
Establishing himself in London, he became a renowned painter of portraits of important
and wealthy aristocrats during this period. Included among his clients were Princess
Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg, Queen of Spain, the Duke of Cambridge, Admiral Sir
John Fisher, General Sir John Gordon and Lady Gordon, Sir George Cooper and Lady
Cooper, Lady Vivian, Lady St. Oswald and Lady Clementina Waring among many others.

After residing in London for more than a decade, Bartlett returned to New York City
sometime before 1908 when the first of his two sons, by his English wife Leona Anton,
was born in 1908. He lived initially in the Bronx where but moved to Brooklyn by 1912.
An article in a Brooklyn newspaper reveals that he was a local celebrity due to having
been the model for a sculpture of Alexander Hamilton then located outside of Brooklyn’s
Hamilton Club on Remsen St. (The sculpture is currently located in St. Nicholas Park in
Upper Manhattan.) The sculpture was created for the 1893 for the Chicago World’s Fair
by the sculptor William Ordway Partridge who had been Bartlett’s roommate and
traveling companion in both Paris and Netherlands. The article reports that Partridge’s
1893 sculpture of Shakespeare in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, is also modeled after Bartlett.

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