William Henry Bartlett
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for William Henry Bartlett
William Henry Bartlett
British, 1809 - 1854
English draughtsman, active also in the Near East, Continental Europe and North America. He was a prolific artist and an intrepid traveller. His work became widely known through numerous engravings after his drawings published in his own and other writers’ topographical books. His primary concern was to extract the picturesque aspects of a place and by means of established pictorial conventions to render ‘lively impressions of actual sights’, as he wrote in the preface to The Nile Boat (London, 1849).
During his apprenticeship to John Britton between 1822 and 1829, Bartlett travelled widely in Great Britain and contributed illustrations to several of his master’s antiquarian works. The popularity of travel books in the 1830s and early 1840s provided Bartlett with several commissions. He illustrated John Carne’s Syria, the Holy Land, Asia Minor &c (London, 1836–8), William Beattie’s Switzerland Illustrated (London, 1836) and The Waldenses (London, 1838), Julia Pardoe’s The Beauties of the Bosphorus (London, 1838–40), Nathaniel Parker Willis’s American Scenery (London, 1840) and Canadian Scenery (London, 1842), and many more. As suggested by these titles, Bartlett visited places as far afield as Constantinople and the Niagara Falls, as well as countries in Europe. He went six times to the Near East and four times to North America; among his artistic contemporaries he was perhaps rivalled only by Edward Lear in the range and frequency of his travels. From 1844 he wrote as well as illustrated his own travel books, such as Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem (London, 1844) and The Pilgrim Fathers (London, 1853).
In general, Bartlett’s practice when travelling was to make numerous lively pencil sketches of the people, architecture and landscape he saw (examples sold London, Christie’s, 17 Nov 1987, lots 19–29). These he would later incorporate into the small, but detailed brown ink and wash views that he supplied to the engraver (examples, London, V&A). Occasionally he would work up a more elaborate, watercolour view, such as The Shâria ’El-Gôhargîyeh, Cairo (London, V&A), showing himself as capable a colourist as he was a draughtsman. The contents of Bartlett’s studio were auctioned by Southgate & Barrett on 29 January 1855. [Briony Llewellyn. " Bartlett, William Henry." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T006578.]
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French, 1864 - 1901
