Tom K.

David William Terry, Class of ‘81
1986
Photography/Picture of Oil on Linen
Donated by the Barton Family
Palmer 217
Written by Olivia Garg, Class of ‘24

This portrait depicts Tom K. Barton, a former Colorado College history professor. He was known for his humor, war against elitism in academia, and caring deeply about students and faculty.

What class would you take if it didn’t relate to your major?

The portrait in front of you is of Tom K. Barton (T.K.) It is a photo of a painting that embodies the lifelong community at CC.

T.K. was a well-loved American History professor who taught Afro-American history courses before they became mainstream. He was a professor at CC from 1963 to his death in 1997. T.K. and his wife Ruth, an English professor, were admired faculty at CC. T.K. is memorialized in the Tom K. Barton Seminar Room, and Ruth Barton is memorialized in the library’s Ruth Barton Writing Center.


The artist of the painting was not a history or English major but a theater major. David William Terry was known for his photography and for taking classes with professors he liked, such as Tom and Ruth. Terry graduated in 1981, but that was not the end of his connection to CC. Terry, like his father, went into law and graduated from law school in 1986. In the summer of that year, he audited a class of Tom and Ruth’s in London that his younger sister was in.

 

During the summer, David and his sister went on a weekend trip to a 500-year-old cottage in Stratford and invited Tom and Ruth. It was there that Terry took a photo of Tom that would end up representing T.K. long after his death.

 

In the fall of 1986, Terry made the photo into an oil portrait, an artistic medium he had little practice with.1 According to Terry’s artist website, it is the first portrait he ever made. When Terry finished the original 30-by-24-inch portrait, he gave it to the Barton family. The original painting is still in Barton’s Colorado home, along with the portrait Terry painted of Ruth seven years later.

 

When T.K. died in 1997, the family used the portrait of him as the photo of Tom at his funeral and on the funeral pamphlets. The photographed oil painting became the final image of Tom K. Barton.

 

Seven years after T.K.’s death, the History department dedicated Palmer Room 217 to him. The T.K. Barton Memorial Seminar Room is used to help students broaden their interest in historian work. Carol Neel and Susan Ashley curated the room with Tom’s book collection and a handmade oak table to make the room feel like what Tom embodied, an English club room with a little bit of West Texas.2

 

The iconic image of Tom K. Barton lives on in this room but as a fraction of its original size. I do not know who decided to shrink the portrait and place it in a large frame with empty space, but I do know that the print of hand-painted lines of Tom K. Burton is a history of a student’s lifelong connection to T.K. and his family.

 

David William Terry took a professor’s class because he believed it would be fun, leading to a lifelong bond between him, his former professors, and the C.C. community.

Endnotes:

1 Why I Paint Portraits: The Day I Decided to Devote My Life to Painting Portraits, David William Terry Fine Art Portraits, https://www.davidterryartist.com/page/9121/why-i-paint-portraits.

2Past To Present, A Colorado College History Department Newsletter, December 2004.