He studied law and fought in the Franco-Prussian War in General Bourbaki's army and became a prisoner in Switzerland. In due course he attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he studied painting under Barthélemy Menn and Jean-Léon Gérôme.[1] He then set himself up in a studio in Paris and became a close friend of Edgar Degas. He married the daughter of a marquis, Prospérie de Fleury, but she died at a young age in 1887.
Much encouraged by Degas he decided to try his hand at sculpture and executed the moving sculpture which marked his wife's grave in Crépy-en-Valois. He now concentrated exclusively on sculpture and from 1891 onwards he exhibited each year at the yearly Salon of the Société nationale des Beaux-arts. Funerary sculpture was very much in vogue in France at that time and much of Bartholomé's is death related and his masterpiece is the monument in Père Lachaise Cemetery dedicated to all the dead.
He was to work on this for ten years and the inauguration took place in 1899. The "Monument the Dead" is disturbing and involves twenty-one larger-than-life-size figures all showing different emotions and reactions to death. There is little sentiment in this composition which is uncompromising, secular and human, although there is an inference that a "light" will defeat the darkness, with the inscription:
"Upon those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned".
