1 Silent Seasons-Winter, 1968. Color lithograph on paper, 66.2 x 51.1 cm (26 1/8 x 20 1/8 in.). National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Atelier Mourlot Ltd. When Will Barnet discusses the family, his tone is reverential. a recent interview, the eighty-four-year-old artist spoke about the origins of his longtime family iconography, which draws on everything from Italian films to Egyptian hieroglyphics to the art and mythology of Greece and Rome. In my early years, the intimate genre of Vermeer was a big influence, Barnet explained. As I said to one of my classes later on, 'He could take a corner of a room and make it into a whole world.' Throughout his career, Barnet (b. 1911) has striven to achieve this same kind of intimacy through depictions of his family. At first, my father, with his parrots and cats and dogs, became my model for the symbol of the family. He wasn't just a specific person, but an idea-a general feeling of an old man sitting at a kitchen table with light streaming in and surrounded by pets and younger family. It all added up to interesting imagery. So as a young student in my twenties, I did paintings and etchings of my father in all kinds of ways, showing him as a working man who symbolized certain aspects of a family structure I was part of. Then my mother became part of it, and later, my first wife and our three sons. Then of course when Elena and I got married forty-two years ago, she, her mother, our daughter, and the new grandchildren became an important part of it, too.' Indeed, the theme of family persists throughout every stage of Barnet's development as an artist. It appears in the charcoal sketches of his teenage years in Beverly, Massachusetts, in his work as a student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in the many drawings of contemporary life he made when he first moved to New York in the 1930s. Since then, in his long career as painter, printmaker, and teacher at the Art Students League and the Cooper Hewitt, the family as a subject has continued to loom large. Several works in the current exhibition at the National Museum of American Art provide examples of his distinctive and personal family imagery.2 The animals he so closely associates with his father appear again and again as family symbols in his work. Silent Seasons-Winter (fig. 1), painted in the restrained palette of grays, browns, blacks, and shades of blue, maroon, or purple he often uses to this day, his daughter Ona is pictured in profile in the lower left-hand corner. She holds a strand of wool that descends in a sharp diagonal from the beak of a parrot perched on a window ledge in the upper right-a strand of wool that symbolically ties her to her grandfather.