Painter and printmaker, teacher at the Art Students League. Barnet’s images of women and domestic scenes, distinctive in their emphasis on flat painting surfaces, are meditative in tone.

Will Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then moved to New York in 1930 to attend the Art Students League. He worked as a printer for the school and experimented with techniques such as lithography, etching, and woodcutting. After his first son was born, Barnet began a series of paintings that show scenes of family life. The domestic life of the family is the most prominent recurring theme in Barnet's work, which explores the human condition, as well as relationships between man and nature. The artist's own family members are transformed into symbols of the universal family unit as the timeless essence of civilization. Finding that abstraction comes more naturally with forms that are so familiar, Barnet gradually pares his subjects to their essentials, without sacrificing their expressive qualities.

He experimented with abstraction for several years, aiming to ​“eliminate realistic space” in favor of simple geometric forms. His later work was more representational and focused almost entirely on the female form, emphasizing the contrast between natural curves and rigidly composed backgrounds of horizontal and vertical forms.

The  Nurse marks a change in Barnet focus on the social reality of the working class in NY during the Depression.

In 1935, Barnet married Mary Sinclair, who was also a student at the League. Between 1939 and 1944, his wife gave birth to three sons, Peter, Richard, and Todd.

"The Nurse" as she looks over  with a gentle feel in her eyes appears to be watching over Mary and her first son Peter narrowing the date to 1939. The chair she sits on can be identified in other family scenes taking place in that same room

The birth of his children moved Barnet in a new artistic direction, away from social commentary moving  into the intimate world of his own family.

By the late 1930s, he found himself disputing with the “social group of artists…I felt that the emphasis was too much on story-telling and not enough on painting your experience in relationship to the world.” 

“Painting my family gave me the freedom to be an artist. They’re so much a part of me. I could take tremendous liberties with them that I couldn’t take with those I’m not familiar with.” 

In this work titled the Nurse, Barnet does exactly that and more.  What we are seeing is a working class African American woman nurse sitting on a chair. Her body turned to the side, head tilted she needs a clear view of what the viewer is not invited to see. Her hands are hovering just above her knees, her attention is complete. As for us the viewer, Barnet has given us two different composition, the one  depicted in the work itself of  the working class nurse  while the other one is brought to our imagination of Barnet's wife Mary with her son Peter on the other side.