Hartrick was born in
Bangalore, the son of Captain William Hartrick of the
7th Regiment of Foot and his wife Josephine Smith, daughter of Dr Archibald Smith of Edinburgh. The family moved to Scotland when Hartrick was two years old. His father died shortly afterwards and in due course his mother married Charles Blatherwick, a doctor and keen amateur watercolourist who had been involved in the establishment of the
Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour. After attending
Fettes College, Hartrick studied medicine at
Edinburgh University before studying art at the
Slade School of Art in London and then at both the
Academie Julian and the
Atelier Cormon in Paris. He spent the summer of 1886 at
Pont-Aven with
Paul Gauguin. Hartrick drew and painted Gauguin, van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec during his time in France. Hartrick became a prolific magazine artist and also provided illustrations for the magazine
Black and White, for the
Daily Chronicle,
The Ludgate Monthly and
Pall Mall Budget. Hartrick moved to London, where he taught drawing at the
Camberwell School of Art from 1908 to 1914 and later at the
Central School of Art, where he taught lithography until 1929. His work was also part of the painting event in the
art competition at the
1932 Summer Olympics. A series of his works showing rural characters, entitled
Cotswold Types was acquired by the
British Museum. During the war, he also produced a series of twelve lithographs under the title
London in Wartime. At the start of the
World War II, he was among the first to offer his services to the
War Artists' Advisory Committee. In 1940, he was the first artist commissioned to record the work of the
Women's Land Army, the same subject he had covered in World War I. Prints of his work were sold in at the
National Gallery during the war and featured in the
Britain at War exhibition that opened at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York in May 1941.{{cite web |author=Imperial War Museum|url=http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1050000842 ==Published works==