| He first studied law; when the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 he enlisted as a volunteer in Gen. Charles Bourbakis army. After the battle of Sedan he fled to Switzerland. As a prisoner on parole, he attended Barthelemy Menns studio at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva and decided to devote himself to painting. He worked alone, in a naturalistic manner heavily influenced by that of Jules Bastien-Lepage, with its insistence on working in the open air rather than in the studio. Bartholome exhibited for eight years at the Salon des Artistes Francais, receiving encouragement from Joris-Karl Huysmans. His first wifes death in 1887 plunged him into depression; his best friend, Edgar Degas, advised him to sculpt a tombstone for her .Soon after, Bartholome embarked on the chief work of his career: from 1889 to 1899 he worked on the stone Monument to the Dead in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris, which, together with Rodins Gates of Hell, is one of the greatest expressions of Symbolist sculpture. This large stone sculpture in high relief, with its harmonious rhythms, its lyrical interlinking of figures and its sober modeling expresses in sculpture an ideal of refined restraint close to that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Among Bartholomes minor works of this period is the expressive mask of the Japanese official Tadamasa Hayashi. Later he returned to sculpture in the round and executed some handsome female nudes. From 1907 to 1912 he worked on the stone cenotaph of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Pantheon, Paris. This is a simple, serious work, punctuated by the classicizing repetition of five female figures.From 1918 onwards, Bartholome devoted himself to executing monuments to the dead of World War I. The Cognac monument, with its two noble female figures embracing one another, reveals a technique almost Impressionist in its blurred contours, while the Le Creusot (Saone-et-Loire) monument shows more contemporary influences in the socialist themes of its bas-reliefs. Bartholome took part in the establishment of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts; he was for many years the Societys vice-president and later its president. |
