EDUTAINMENT

Edutainment > Charles Bartlett - 1860-1940

Benares - 1916

Charles Bartlett is one of about half a dozen Western artists who made designs for woodblock prints in collaboration with the Tokyo publisher Watanabe Shozaburo. When Bartlett and his wife entered a ship leaving England in 1913, they had no idea that they would never see the green meadows of their homeland again.

A British Artist

Charles Bartlett was born in Bridgeport, Dorsetshire in England. After a short excursion into the field of metallurgy, he studied painting and etching at the Royal Academy in London and later at a private art school in Paris.

In 1913 Bartlett began a journey that was planned as a trip around the world. When he and his wife left England, they had no idea that they would never see their homeland again. They visited Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Indonesia and China. Bartlett created watercolors and sketches on this tour. Center of his artistic attention were such landmark attractions like the Taj Mahal in Agra, India.

The Watanabe Print Shop

Kyoto - 1916

In 1915 the artist and his wife arrived in Japan. In Tokyo they met the Austrian artist Fritz Capelari who one day took them to the print shop of Watanabe Shozaburo. Watanabe was the driving force of the Shin Hanga art movement and permanently looking for good artists who were capable of making print designs for him that his artisans - carvers and printers - then transformed into a modernized form of the old traditional Japanese woodblock. The style of Bartlett's watercolors with colorful, large flat areas was much in line with Watanabe's idea of a modern Japanese print.

In 1916 Watanabe published 21 prints with Bartlett. Many were from sketches that the artist had made in India. A series of 6 prints show Japanese landscapes and town views. These look somewhat like modernized Hiroshige designs.

Honolulu Hawaii

In 1917 Charles Bartlett and his wife left Japan. Their destination was North America. And from there they wanted to return to England. But their lives took an unplanned twist. The artist and his wife remained in Hawaii for the rest of their lives. Bartlett became a respected and popular artist with successful exhibitions in Hawaiian and New York galleries.

Until 1926 Bartlett made 17 more designs and sent them to Watanabe in Tokyo who translated them into woodblock prints. Some of the new subjects showed Hawaiian scenes like Surf Riders, Honolulu. In 1919 the artist may have returned to Japan for a short visit.

Charles Bartlett died in April 1940, twenty months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Literature sources used for this Bartlett Charles biography:

• Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada, "Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975", published by University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-1732-X
• Amy Reigle Stephens, "The New Wave - Twentieth Century Japanese Prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection", Bamboo Publishing Ltd. London and Hotei - Japanese Prints, Leiden, ISBN 1-870076-19-2

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