Will Barnet's long career spanned nearly nine decades. His interest in art began as a boy in Beverly, Massachusetts, where he established a studio in his parents' home at the age of 12. Barnet's father worked at United Shoe as a machinist and told his young son that factory work "destroyed a man's soul"; his mother encouraged Barnet to pursue his dream of being an artist. Barnet spent many hours in the local library pouring over its art books. He later wrote: “I used to bury myself in those rooms day after day. It was practically my whole life. That’s where my first yearning for art began.” After leaving high school before graduating, Barnet enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he studied with Philip Leslie Hale. Three years later he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York, and his life as a professional artist began.

Barnet's vast knowledge of art history informed his evolution as an artist. He distilled his interests in Asian art, classical Greek art, Native American art, and Old Master painting, to name only a few, into a singular artistic style that he cultivated throughout his career. His elegantly stylized portraits and classically composed paintings are both beautiful and enigmatic. He draws the viewer in and holds his or her attention by presenting scenes of everyday life with simplicity, honesty and great beauty. Indeed, Barnet possessed an extraordinary talent for capturing the universal in particular and personal moments from his life.

Barnet's connection to New England is also noteworthy. John Updike in Will Barnet: My Father's House rightly postulates that Barnet's New England heritage factored greatly into his paintings. Updike wrote: "Are we wrong to sense in his work a specifically New England quality, derived from the chaste and elegant severity of its tombstones, its saltbox houses, its plain wooden furniture, its clean cold light? While his direct heritage did not include Puritanism, the hymnlike metrics and slant metaphysics of Emily Dickinson's poetry have repeatedly served him as an overt inspiration. His style, like hers, seeks the bones of things."