Bartlett began exhibiting his work in the Paris Salon at the age of 14. He studied with the well-known animalier sculptors, George Gardet and Emmanuel Frémiet, and by the time he was twenty was well trained in French modelling as well as casting techniques. According to Wayne Craven, during the Salon of 1895, he received great acclaim for a group of "small bronzes of animals, fish, batrachians, and crustaceans" which he had cast himself using the lost-wax method (Craven, Sculpture in America, London, 1984 reprint, p. 430).