Jonathan Adams Bartlett

The few portraits that have been attributed to Jonathan Adams Bartlett show him to have been an accomplished painter in the so-called folk tradition practiced in the first half of the nineteenth century by America's self-trained artisans, usually working outside of sophisticated urban centers. Beyond his own descendants Bartlett was unknown as a painter until the 1970s, when his signed portrait of his fiancée and a self-portrait attributed to Bartlett (both now in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center) came to light.

A farmer's son, Bartlett was born in South Rumford, Maine. He married in 1842 and fathered eight children. During the Civil War, Bartlett served in the Union Army, but otherwise he appears to have spent his entire life near his birthplace. He was a farmer and carpenter, but also a talented speaker, an amateur actor, a vocal and instrumental musician, a photographer, and a teacher of drawing and penmanship. He did decorative wall-painting and sign-painting. One still life painting has been attributed to Bartlett, and family tradition holds that he painted landscapes as well. For a man of such versatile abilities, painting portraits undoubtedly posed no great challenge. Bartlett's presumed self-portrait shows the tools he used to grind and mix pigments and employs the conventional props of sophisticated portraiture, indicating both his technical knowledge of his craft and his awareness of the grand painting tradition. In Bartlett's portraits, these aspects of professional art-making met the inventive practicality of the rural Yankee craftsman.