A graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Bartlett spent two years at Harvard and then led a rather unremarkable adult life trying to keep small businesses afloat. The dolls were a secret hobby, a project he shared with only a few close friends and the handyman neighbor who carried Bartlett’s groceries up the stairs every Monday for almost twenty years. This is where the story of Bartlett’s “sweethearts” comes to life and where he parts company with a long tradition of doll collectors and doll-making hobbyists.īartlett, who died at the age of eighty-three, never married and lived alone his entire life. Discovered in a Boston brownstone on their maker’s death in 1992, the child figures (the last of which was made in 1963) seem to have been groomed primarily for cameo appearances in a group of uncanny, stunningly moody, and ultimately disturbing black-and-white photographs. Once the figures were sculpted, Bartlett devoted himself to their maintenance and costuming, which involved hours of painting, sewing elaborately pleated skirts and smocked blouses, embroidering jackets, knitting cardigans, hats, scarves, and socks, and customizing wigs. Stacks of anatomy books, detailed measuring diagrams, and growth charts from children’s shoe shops provided reference for Bartlett’s scale drawings of children’s development in monthly intervals from ages eight through sixteen. Bartlett, unlike Humbert, had to make his diminutive Lolitas from scratch, in fully realized detail, from their toenails up to their finely articulated tongues. When considering the life and works of Morton Bartlett one can’t help but wonder about the care and feeding of the fifteen exquisite plaster children he constructed (and then photographed) in relative secrecy over the course of three decades. Befuddled, bemused, and frustrated, he found himself ultimately overwhelmed by the mammoth task of caring for and feeding an adolescent girl. Shopping for clothes and comic books, managing sightseeing itineraries, or fetching ice-cold cherry Cokes, he seemed almost the model dad, or at least the diligent guardian. Humbert Humbert was never more tender or seemingly plausible as a family man than when tending to Lolita’s more mundane requirements. Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) Having moreover studied a midsummer sale book, it was with a very knowing air that I examined various pretty articles, sport shoes, sneakers, pumps of crushed kid for crushed kids.
Dream pink, frosted aqua, glans mauve, tulip red, oolala black. Swimming suits? We have them in all shades.
Essential garden bartlett light blue stack chair full#
Goodness, what crazy purchases were prompted by the poignant predilection Humbert had in those days for check weaves, bright cottons, frills, puffed-out short sleeves, soft pleats, snug-fitting bodices and generously full skirts! Oh Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s, and what little girl would not like to whirl in a circular skirt and scanties? Did I have something special in mind? coaxing voices asked me.
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