Dorfred House

In 1902, the Bartletts moved into their new home at 2901 Prairie Avenue, Chicago.^[6] 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.^[7][8]

The Prairie Avenue home of Frederic Clay Bartlett 2901 Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois

Works of art

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. In 1909 Barlett completed a series of individual paintings that covered over fifty ceiling panels of the Michigan Room in the University Club of Chicago. Soon after he painted a series of murals—which were destroyed in a fire in 1957—for the Chicago City Council chambers in the new City Hall-County Building.^[9][10]

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.

Bonnet House

Between May 1, 1893, and March 1920, Hugh Birch and Helen Birch Bartlett purchased hundreds of acres of Floridian land that would eventually become Hugh Taylor Birch State Park as well as the Bonnet House.^[12] Construction of the Bonnet House, a plantation-style home, began in 1920 on land that was given to the Bartletts as a wedding gift from her father. Currently on the National Register of Historic Places, the Bonnet House was intended to be the location for the Bartlett family to spend their winters. However, due to their constant travels in Europe, the family would spend summer days in Lake Geneva while maintaining their apartment in Manhattan near Columbus Circle.^[12][13]

Bonnet House,
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Art inspiration

Helen Birch and Frederic Bartlett were married in Boston at a private ceremony attended only by Senator Albert Beveridge and his wife Catherine Eddy Beveridge and Mrs. Marshall Field Sr., the former Delia Spencer, both cousins of Birch. For their honeymoon, the couple traveled throughout Asia, traveling to Japan, China and the Philippines. It was during this trip that Bartlett would be inspired to create twenty-one paintings that would be exhibited in the Art Institute's American Exhibitions of 1919 and 1920, as well as in his one-man exhibition at the Montross Gallery in New York City in 1921.^[4]

Collections

The Bartletts were a dynamic couple. From like upbringings, they had similar interests and played off each other's strengths. They were fixtures of Chicago's civic-minded elite during the early 1900s. Prior to their marriage, Frederic's art collection focused on a variety of sources, including antique, Renaissance, and 19th-century fine and decorative arts. In the early 1920s, their collecting activities became more focused. Leading a cosmopolitan lifestyle, the couple traveled regularly to Europe, where they acquired a collection of modern art. Concentrating on the contemporary French avant-garde, they purchased works by André Derain, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, André Lhôte, and Amedeo Modigliani. In the spring of 1923, they acquired Henri Matisse's, Woman Before an Aquarium. The following year, less than one year after Frederic succeeded his father as a trustee of the Art Institute, they acquired Georges Seurat's, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. This purchase was made specifically with the museum in mind, at a time when the artist was not yet represented in any American or French public collection. Over the next several years, with the intention of placing La Grande Jatte in an appropriate artistic context, the Bartletts purchased major paintings by key Post-Impressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as important works by other modern masters, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau.^[14]

Memorial collection

After only six-and-one-half years of marriage, Helen Birch Bartlett died of cancer on October 24, 1925. To honor his wife, Frederic presented their unique art collection to the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1926. A portion of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection has been permanently displayed in the museum continuously since the donation. During the 1920s and 30's, Bartlett would swap-out paintings in order to add pieces that would be a better representation or example of the work or artists displayed. The twenty-five paintings in the collection are still in the possession of the Art Institute as well as other works from the same historical time-frame.^[15]

Private collection

In addition to the paintings in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, the Bartletts' private collection contained paintings by other modern European artists, among them Vlaminck, Dufy, Herbin, Foujita, de la Fresnaye, Valadon, Marcoussis, Severini, and Pascin, which were not part of the final donation to the Art Institute. Still others were by artists whose names are no longer easily recognized, such as Lotiron, Beaudin, Waroquier, Pruna, and Marmorek. Among the few Americans represented in the collection were John Mann and Charles Demuth, whose watercolors The Brook and Flowers, respectively, the Bartletts acquired in 1924. (While the present whereabouts of most of these works is not known, the aforementioned watercolors are in the Art Institute.) The Bartletts' lack of interest in collecting modern American art occurred despite the fact that Frederic was a founding member of the Art Institute's Friends of American Art, established in 1910 as the first organization in any museum to purchase current work by American artists for the collection. This group, which lasted into the 1940s, provided the Art Institute with the substance of its collection of twentieth-century American painting and sculpture but it tended to overlook the work of the American avant-garde.

Artwork

During his marriage to Evelyn, Frederic Bartlett's eyesight began to fail based on cataracts he had contracted. This affected his ability to paint, however; it heightened Evelyn's desire to create works of art. The couple gave up their Chicago apartment on Astor Street and their studio in the Fine Arts Building and moved to Massachusetts while wintering at the Bonnet House in Florida. They opened a studio in Munich, Germany and, with her husband's encouragement, Evelyn took up painting. She moved quickly from watercolors to oils and developed her own style. Her interests included vividly colored portraits, still lifes and flower paintings. Her creations bore little resemblance to her husband's murals, landscapes and figurative works, executed in muted tones.

Memorial collection addition

In 1932, Toulouse-Lautrec's "Ballet Dancers" was the final addition to the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection as well as the last painting acquired by Frederic Bartlett.^[4] Bartlett would continue to gift institutions with artwork, although none was comparable to the collection given to the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1942, Bartlett presented the Indianapolis Museum of Art with a bust of Senator Beveridge created by Paul Manship. The Museum of Modern Art was given Amedeo Modigliani's Bride and Groom. These would be the final museum gifts Bartlett would produce.^[4]