Painter, architectural decorator and stage designer, brought up in London, whose family had strong artistic interests. His love of drawing and art developed at Ampleforth College. Bartlett studied for a year at art college on the south coast; visited Jamaica where a brother worked; then returned to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, 1934–7, which he where he met Elizabeth Frere Stephens, whom he married in 1941. With the encouragement of his teacher Vladimir Polunin, in the late 1930s Bartlett designed scenery for the Old Vic. During World War II, as an anti-aircraft gunner in Scotland he brought down a German Ju88 aircraft with a bren gun fired from the hip, afterwards serving in north Africa and Italy. Bartlett re-entered the Slade, 1945–8.