Will Barnet
Will Barnet was an American artist known for his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints depicting the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds. A printmaker and painter who was well known for his elegantly stylized portraits and classically composed visions of beautiful women and children In the prints and paintings that he produced from the mid-1960s on. A skilled draftsman, he created distinctively linear, subtly colored portraits of family members and friends. In the enigmatic pictures he began making in the 1970s, creating images of women in dark woods or on the porches of seaside houses who appear to be waiting for loved ones like 19th-century sailors’ wives.
As a student Barnet attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and, on a scholarship, went to New York to study at the Art Students League, arriving in 1931. Barnet had his first solo exhibition at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan in 1935 and, three years later, his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery, also in Manhattan.
