Richard William Barton (1928–1992) was born in New York City, and he grew up just a few blocks from the Morgan. A lifelong storyteller, Barton favored anecdotes that emphasize his hardscrabble childhood as a “dead-end kid.” Low on funds, and having completed only two years of high school, the budding artist embarked on an extensive self-guided education at the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At seventeen he enlisted in the US Navy, visiting China during his service. The primacy of line in traditional Chinese brush painting had an enduring impact on him.
Barton was discharged from the navy early, following a hospitalization that was likely related to mental illness; he described himself as paranoid psychotic. He relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1950s, at the height of the Beat era. Two decades later, he moved to San Diego, where he remained until his death in 1992. In San Francisco, Barton appears to have intersected with less prominent Beat figures of the day, developing his own cohort of artists and interlocutors. But there are few records of his activities after the mid-1960s, and the life of this unusual artist largely remains a mystery.