Morton Bartlett

1909-1992 · Boston, Massachusetts, USA

A Boston graphic designer spent 27 years secretly sculpting a plaster family of children, sewing their clothes and photographing them. The world found out at an antiques fair, a year after he died.

The life

Bartlett was born in Chicago in 1909, orphaned at eight and adopted by a Massachusetts family. He was educated at Phillips Exeter and spent two years at Harvard before dropping out during the Depression, later serving in an Army engineering unit in the war and working as a freelance graphic designer and photographer. From 1936 to 1963, alone and in private, he modelled a family of half-life-size children in clay and plaster, taught himself sewing, knitting and photography to dress and portray them, and showed the project to no one. He died in Boston in 1992; in 1993 the dealer Marion Harris bought the entire archive at an antiques fair and published it as Family Found.

The work

Around fifteen meticulously modelled plaster figures of children, studied from anatomy texts, with hand-sewn wardrobes, and roughly 200 black-and-white photographs and 17 colour slides staging them in scenes by turns sentimental, poignant and humorous. His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.

Why we love them

An orphan who manufactured the family he never had, complete and photographed for the record. Few artworks hold loneliness and craft so tightly together.

Go deeper

• Morton Bartlett at the Outsider Art Fair
• Morton Bartlett on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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