Ever fallen in love with a city you were stuck in during a layover and decided to live there? It happened to Mr. Charles W. Bartlett!

Yes, the Englishman fell for a little place called Honolulu in 1917 on his voyage from Japan back to England and made it his home for the next twenty years.  Let me just pause right here for a second and say that is the WEIRDEST route possible from Japan to England. But who knows how these kooky, seafaring, twentieth century folks planned their excursions. Anyway, Bartlett ended up becoming a big deal in Honolulu. His new buddy, Anna Rice Cooke, was founder of the Honolulu Academy of Arts and became his patron. From one-man shows at her own private residence to retrospectives at the Honolulu Museum of Arts, Bartlett killed it in his new tropical home base.

Wealthy ladies with connections always seemed to cross his path. His second wife, Catherine “Kate” Main, who was the daughter of a loaded Scot shipbuilder. She had plenty of moneys, which probably helped fund Bartlett’s trip to Asia in 1913. He spent time in Ceylon, China, the Indian sub-continent, Indonesia and Japan. Already a fan of Japanese woodblock prints, Bartlett hooked up with a dude named Watanabe, who was a woodblock print publisher. Watanabe was into reproducing the works of the ukiyo-e (Floating World) masters whose work Bartlett admired. Already an accomplished watercolor painter, CWB wanted to work this style into his own paintings, so he trained in the Japanese style and collaborated with Watanabe to create groups of woodblock prints. He also made a whole bunch of paintings and woodblocks inspired by the Indian landscape, with the Taj Mahal as one of his fav subjects.  Then, in 1917, he and wifey headed out of Japan and ended up settling in that tropical paradise. We're trying not to be jealous.