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(Henry) Charles Bartlett

Born 1921, Grimsby, Lincolnshire UK. Died 2014.

Bartlett's art training began Eastbourne School of Art where he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, this was delayed by army service during the Second World War and taken up in 1946. He spent three years studying in the School of Engraving, where he was taught by Robert Austin, and then was awarded a fourth year in the Painting School, leaving in 1959. He acknowledged the important influences of Austin and his painting tutor Ruskin Spear and found particular inspiration in artists such as Walter Sickert, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

After leaving the RCA, Bartlett became a part-time teacher in several London art colleges, finally taking up a full-time senior lectureship at Harrow School of Art in 1960 where remained for ten years before deciding to become a full-time artist. By this time he had become recognised as an innovative printmaker, using multiple copper plates for his colourful renditions of the landscape in which he sought to draw out the textures and abstract qualities of the subject. He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in 1961, later becoming Vice President, and in 1970 was made Fellow of the Royal Watercolour Society, becoming President from 1979 to 1983.

His watercolours, oil paintings and prints were exhibited regularly throughout his career at societies, groups and galleries, including the Royal Academy, the New English Art Club, the RWS and various commercial galleries, particularly in East Anglia where the coastal landscape, estuaries and boats provided the subject matter for much of his art; in 1997 he was given a large retrospective exhibition at the Bankside Gallery in London.

Examples of his work are held in many public and private collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council, the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, the National Gallery of South Australia and the Albertine Collection in Vienna.

Blue Foreshore
Stone Quay
Oyster Boats
Nets Drying