From the estate of the artist.
Painted in Cincinnati at the artist’s home studio. There are two other versions of this subject, a series of sea shells arranged in horizontal order. While Barnett used a narrow horizontal format for his depiction of country auctions in Vermont a decade earlier, his use of this format for still life is unique to these sea shell studies. The shells were a gift from a next-door neighbor in Cincinnati who was an avid traveler and shell collector.
