William Henry Bartlett was born in London, England in 1809. During his career, Bartlett made several trips to North America. In the late 1830s, he traveled around Canada sketching towns, villages, and rural landscapes in what were then the provinces of Lower Canada, Upper Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
It was at this time that he visited the Eastern Townships. Ultimately Bartlett's drawings would appear as a collection of steel engravings in Canadian Scenery Illustrated, published in London in 1842 by Bartlett and N. P. Willis.
Twenty "Bartlett prints," as they are affectionately called, feature scenes in and around Sherbrooke, Stanstead, Lake Massawippi, Lake Memphremagog, Georgeville, Magog, Bolton, and Orford. Though romanticized in their depictions of the rugged frontier, Bartlett prints nevertheless represent a major contribution to Canadian pictorial history.
They are also among the earliest depictions of the Eastern Townships. William Henry Bartlett died at sea in the Mediterranean in 1854