Will Barnet (1911 – 2012) was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, and knew by age ten that he wanted to be an artist. He trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston before moving to New York City in 1930 to study at the Art Students League. By 1936, he had established himself as a professional printer and the youngest instructor of graphic arts ever to hold a faculty position at the League, where he influenced generations of students. He also taught at Cooper Union, Yale University, Cornell University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, among other leading schools. Throughout his long career, spanning eight decades, he moved between different stylistic periods, from early social realist work to modernist abstractions, to his well-known refined figurative style, and finally, his return to abstraction in his last decade.

Barnet was a longtime resident of the National Arts Club. He died on November 13, 2012, at the age of 101, in New York City. His artworks are in museum collections throughout the U.S., including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. He has been the subject of over eighty solo exhibitions, including at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the National Academy of Design, the National Museum of American Art, the Montclair Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Worcester Art Museum, among others. In 2011, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama, and in 2012, France conferred the insignia of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters on Barnet.