AW039 - Dana Bartlett - Oil on Canvas

TITLE: Coastal Mountain Scene

COMMENTS: This Dana Bartlett oil is a rich and colorful scene of a house in the California Laguna hills. The image size is 16" by 20".  It is oil on canvas and is signed by the artist in the lower right hand corner. The provenance of this oil is from a well known and reputable art dealer in Santa Barbara.

     Painter Dana Bartlett (1882-1957)  was born in Ionia, Michigan on November 19, 1882. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City under William M. Chase and Charles Warren Eaton and went on to have a studio in Boston. He worked as a commercial artist for the Foster - Kleiser company in Portland, Oregon . He moved to Los Angeles in 1915 intending to become a landscape painter. His first Los Angeles exhibit was in 1916 and  included oil paintings, watercolors and pastels as well as black and white monotypes, which he heightened with a slight tint of watercolor. In 1924 he traveled to Europe with the intention of making a special study of how Titian, Turner and Monticelli applied their color. Upon his return he experimented with the use of Venetian tempera as an underpainting. What resulted were a number of imaginative landscapes and still lifes painted in a high decorative fashion with brilliant, jewel-like transparent glowing colors.   

     Bartlett began organizing  circulating exhibitions in 1927 and held a successful solo show of his own work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  The following year he opened an art gallery in Los Angeles where he exhibited his paintings as well as those of other local artists.  Bartlett painted nocturnes and scenes from his travels.  His decorative style embodies the Eucalyptus School.  Bartlett was a teacher at Chouinard School of Art and an active member of the Southern California art community for over four decades. He died in Los Angeles on July 3, 1957.