Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection

The Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection is an art collection held by the Art Institute of Chicago. It is based on a collection assembled by Helen Louise Birch and her husband, Frederic Clay Bartlett.

Helen Louise Birch and Frederic Clay Bartlett were married in Boston on January 22, 1919 at a private ceremony attended only by Senator and Mrs. Albert Beveridge and Mrs. Marshall Field, Sr., both relatives of Birch. The Bartlett's were a dynamic couple, both from like upbringings, they had similar interests and played off each other's strengths. They were a fixture of Chicago’s civic-minded elite during the early 1900's. Prior to their marriage, Frederic's art collection focused on a variety of sources, including antique, Renaissance, and 19th-century fine and decorative arts. Bartlett was himself a talented artist and muralist.

In the early 1920s, their collecting activities became more focused. Leading a cosmopolitan lifestyle, the couple traveled regularly to Europe, where they acquired a collection of modern art. Concentrating on the contemporary French avant-garde, they purchased works by André Derain, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, André Lhôte, and Amedeo Modigliani.

In the spring of 1923, they acquired Henri Matisse’s, Woman Before an Aquarium. The following year, less than one year after Frederic succeeded his father, Adolphus Clay Bartlett, as a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, they acquired Georges Seurat’s, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. This purchase was made specifically with the museum in mind, at a time when the Seurat was not yet represented in any American or French public collection. Over the next several years, with the intention of placing "La Grande Jatte" in an appropriate artistic context, the Bartletts purchased major paintings by key Post-Impressionist artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as important works by other modern masters, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau.

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