About the artist
Artistic development
Before he had ever set foot in Greece, Bartlett was passionately interested in classical mythology as interpreted by romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. Once he was painting from life in Greece, he was both preoccupied with and excited by the extraordinary intensity of light in the landscape and how this behaved in different settings. At times he writes of the ‘champagne’ like quality of the light – as if inebriated by its effervescence, whether illuminating an olive tree or glowing within an interior.Just as important to Bartlett was the passage of everyday rural life, which becomes to his eye a living mythology where a labourer resting under an olive tree or a group of card players take over from earlier imagined compositions.
There is a shift in style in the later paintings seen on this website, with less emphasis on nature and more on form. The influence of his Slade teacher Vladimir Polunin comes into play here, as well as that of renaissance Italian masters such as Mantegna and Donatello. Whilst his interest in the figure has intensified, the subject matter still celebrates ordinary life – but with more of an iconic overlay.