Girl Reading

When he was a twenty-seven, Bartlett embarked on the somewhat unusual hobby of making dolls, an exacting pursuit that occupied him for nearly thirty years. Though he worked intermittently as a graphic design, he had no art or medical training to prepare him for sculpting figures in clay, which he later cast in plaster. The dolls all portray children and early adolescents and were posed in lifelike situations for the camera, as in this image. Making these meticulously crafted dolls was a private obsession for Bartlett, and his creation were discovered only after his death.