In 1894, Bartlett, along with fellow Chicagoan, Robert Allerton, would be admitted to the Royal Academy in Munich, an honor that very few Americans would earn.

It was during his time in Germany that Bartlett would meet Dora Tripp from White Plains, New York, the woman that would eventually become his wife.

[5] On October 4, 1898, Bartlett and Tripp would get married in upstate New York and spend the next year in Paris, studying under American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Académie Carmen.

After Whistler's school closed, Bartlett enhanced his painting prowess by studying mural art with the direction of French master, Puvis de Chavannes.

In 1900, at the age of twenty-seven, Bartlett moved to Chicago where he rented a studio in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue.

After a fire destroyed the church, Bartlett and his friend, Howard Van Doren Shaw, integrated frescoes depicting the Tree of Life and a Heavenly Choir painted in the Byzantine manner.

He completed a frieze in stained-glass depicting a medieval tournament procession for the Frank Dickinson Bartlett Memorial Gymnasium on the campus of the University of Chicago.

In 1909 Barlett completed a series of individual paintings that covered over fifty ceiling panels of the Michigan Room in the University Club of Chicago.

Bartlett Jr., who would be known as "Clay", would grow-up and become a talented artist and musician, however; he would unfortunately die at the age of forty-eight in 1955, only two years after the death of his father.

In 1872, he would become the first State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois and eventually move to the area that currently is Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Currently on the National Register of Historic Places, the Bonnet House was intended to be the location for the Bartlett family to spend their winters.

However, due to their constant travels in Europe, the family would spend summer days in Lake Geneva while maintaining their apartment in Manhattan near Columbus Circle.

Leading a cosmopolitan lifestyle, the couple traveled regularly to Europe, where they acquired a collection of modern art.

This purchase was made specifically with the museum in mind, at a time when the artist 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.

A portion of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection has been permanently displayed in the museum continuously since the donation.

[16] In addition to the paintings in the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, the Bartletts' private collection contained paintings by other modern European artists, among them Vlaminck, Dufy, Herbin, Foujita, de la Fresnaye, Valadon, Marcoussis, Severini, and Pascin, which were not part of the final donation to the Art Institute.

Among the few Americans represented in the collection were John Mann and Charles Demuth, whose watercolors The Brook and Flowers, respectively, the Bartletts acquired in 1924.

The couple gave up their Chicago apartment on Astor Street and their studio in the Fine Arts Building and moved to Massachusetts while wintering at the Bonnet House in Florida.

In 1942, Bartlett presented the Indianapolis Museum of Art with a bust of Senator Beveridge created by Paul Manship.