Morton Bartlett

Morton Bartlett (1909 in Boston – 1992) was an American freelance photographer and graphic designer who, from 1936 to 1963, devoted much of his spare time to creating and photographing a series of intricately carved lifelike plaster dolls. He never formally exhibited his work, though a small circle of friends and acquaintances was aware of its existence. Only upon his death in 1992, when the contents of his estate were purchased by New York art and antiques dealer Marion Harris, did his artistic creations become more widely known to the general public.

After cataloguing all the sculptures and photographs, and publishing FAMILY FOUND - The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlett, Marion Harris exhibited the work, organized exhibits and placed his work in museums including The Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Morton Bartlett was born on 20 January 1909 in Chicago, Illinois and orphaned at the age of 8. He was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Warren Goddard Bartlett, a wealthy couple from Cohasset, Massachusetts. Morton was enrolled at Phillips Exeter Academy and later spent two years, 1928 to 1930, studying at Harvard University. After dropping out, possibly due to financial hardships brought on by the Great Depression, Bartlett struggled to earn a living. He passed through a succession of jobs, ranging from crafts magazine editor and gas station attendant to making gift cards and running a printing business. Following service in a US Army engineering unit during WWII, Bartlett took up freelance graphic design and photography, designing catalogs for M. Scharf and Co., a Boston-based toy distributor. He never married, though he may have once been engaged to a woman living across the street from him in Cohasset, Mass. where the two ran a business together during the late 1940s.

In 1936, at the age of 27, Bartlett began the personal hobby that would hold his interest for the next 27 years: dollmaking. He had no formal training in sculpture, but by making use of books on anatomy and medical growth charts he was able to create, first in clay and then cast in plaster, at least 15 half-sized likenesses of children (there may have been more but these are the only ones known to remain). Twelve of them are girls, ranging roughly in age from prepubescence to adolescence, and three are boys, of approximately eight years of age and bearing some resemblance to the artist himself. The dolls were made with detachable arms, legs and heads, allowing for a variety of different poses. They are accurately scaled, depicting his compulsive attention to detail. Bartlett took photos of the dolls in lifelike situations, either nude or wearing hand-made clothes.

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