People keep secrets for many reasons, but more often than not, the mystery stays hidden behind fear and shame—powerful justifications for concealment. That may well be what Morton Bartlett felt about his inanimate family, a hobby known only to his closest circle and which he spoke about publicly just twice in his life.
Morton Bartlett's secret? His inanimate children—his intimate clan of anatomically correct child sculptures. For 37 years, from 1926 to 1963, Bartlett worked to build a family of fifteen members: three boys and twelve pre-adolescent girls, all with perfect anatomy. He did it despite never having received formal training, learning from the anatomy books of the time to create his dream family.
Why Bartlett, a single and solitary man, chose to live surrounded by sculptures of infants may well have gone to the grave with him. We can say, in his own words, quoting a letter written in 1957 to his classmates at Harvard (a university he attended for only two years before leaving), that this was "a private hobby that served as an escape for impulses he could not express in other ways."
Bartlett not only created the sculptures but also enjoyed photographing them, first in black and white and then in Kodachrome. Many of the photographs in this gallery were taken by him in his intimate moments.
Morton Bartlett died in 1992. His collection was discovered by Marion Harris in 1993 at an antiques fair in New York. Harris bought the entire package along with 200 black-and-white photographs and was responsible for bringing light to the life and work of this strange craftsman, exhibiting the sculptures under the name "Family Found: The Lifetime Obsession of Morton Bartlet". Here are some of his works.
Gallery
Source: Wikipedia
