Bo Bartlett is an American realist painter who works in the tradition of Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth. Bartlett's paintings combine the profound qualities of everyday life with the semantic obscurity of René Magritte. Born December 29, 1955 in Columbus, Georgia, Bartlett studied in Florence, Italy before attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 2018, Bartlett and Columbus State University unveiled the Bo Bartlett Center, with a mission to bring arts to the community. He currently lives and works between Columbus, GA, and Wheaton Island, ME, with his wife Betsy Eby. In the book Bo Bartlett, Heartland, Tom Butler wrote, "Bo Bartlett is an American realist with a modernist vision. His paintings are well within the tradition of American realism as defined by artists such as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Like these artists, Bartlett looks at America's heart -- its land and its people -- and describes the beauty he finds in everyday life. His paintings celebrate the underlying epic nature of the commonplace and the personal significance of the extraordinary. Bartlett was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where realist principles must be grasped before modernist ventures are encouraged. He pushes the boundaries of the realist tradition with his multilayered imagery. Life, death, passage, memory, and confrontation coexist easily in the world. Family and friends are the cast of characters that appear in his dreamlike narrative works. Although the scenes are set around his childhood home in Georgia or his island summer home in Maine, they represent a deeper, mythical concept of the archetypal, universal home." Today, Bartlett's works are held in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina, the Denver Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others. In 2022, Bartlett's painting "The Primised Land" sold at Freeman's Auction House in Philadelphia for $352,800, the top lot in Freeman's December 4 American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionists sale. "According to Freeman's specialist and head of sale, Raphaël Chatroux, it attracted so much interest that there were eight phone lines in competition for it, with bidders from Georgia to Maine." (Antiques and the Arts Weekly, 2022) References:“Bo Bartlett Sails To New Auction Record At Freeman’s.” 2022. Antiques And The Arts Weekly. https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/bo-bartlett-sails-to-new-auction-record-at-freemans/.