- His suicide note said he had irrevocably "lost the only woman I ever loved" (the actress Carlotta Monterey had divorced Barton in 1926 and married Eugene O'Neill in 1929), and that he feared his worsening bipolar disorder was approaching insanity. He wrote: "I have had few difficulties, many friends, great successes; I have gone from wife to wife and house to house, visited great countries of the world-but I am fed up with inventing devices to fill up twenty-four hours of the day.".
- Barton was a popular American cartoonist and caricaturist of actors and other celebrities. His work was in heavy demand through the 1920s and has been considered to epitomize the era.
- On May 19, 1931, in his East Midtown Manhattan penthouse apartment, Barton shot himself through the right temple.
- Much of Barton's work from the mid-1920s onward was for The New Yorker magazine, which he joined as an advisory editor from its very beginning in 1924.
- Barton was nearly forgotten soon after his death, shortly before his fortieth birthday.
- Known as the "commuter" by friends and colleagues, Barton ran a lively salon that quickly became an important New York cultural center. He counted Charlie Chaplin, Sinclair Lewis, Paul Robeson and Somerset Maugham among his illustrious guests.
- Barton was an ardent Francophile who had first travelled to Paris in 1915 to study art and to report the war in pictures.
- In 1908 Ralph Barton dropped out of Kansas City's Central High School before graduation. He moved to Chicago in 1909 to attend the Art Institute of Chicago, but soon found he didn't "like Chicago or Chicago people and worst of all the art institute. I could learn twice as much at work," he confided in a letter to his mother.
- In 1927, the French government awarded Barton the Legion of Honour.
- Toward the end of the century, his work was included in several exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery. A 1998 conference on cartooning at the Library of Congress also considered his work.
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