Hartrick was born in Bangalore, the son of an officer in the British Army. 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.
The family moved to Scotland when Hartrick was two years old. Hartrick spent the summer of 1886 at Pont-Aven with Paul Gauguin. Hartrick returned to Scotland and for a while settled in Glasgow, where he came to know the Glasgow Boys, before he moved to London.
There he began work as a book illustrator and as an illustrator with The Graphic in 1890, then with the Pall Mall Magazine in 1893.
He joined the New English Art Club the same year. The couple settled in Gloucestershire from where they both pursued their artistic careers.
They both had works shown at the Continental Gallery in 1901. 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.
Eventually Hartrick had over 200 works shown at the Royal Watercolour Society and he also exhibited at the Venice Biennale on three occasions.
During the First World War, Hartrick contributed works to the British War Memorials collection of artworks. In 1917 Hartrick produced six lithographs on Women"s Work for the War Propaganda Bureau"s Britain"s Efforts and Ideals portfolio of images which were exhibited in Britain and abroad and were also sold as prints to raise money for the war effort. At the start of the Second World War, 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 One.
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.
In 1909 Hartrick was among the founding members of the Senefelder Club. In 1910 Hartrick was elected an associate member of the Royal Watercolour Society and became a full member in 1920.
