The Fossil Hunters is a painting by the American artist Edwin Dickinson (1891–1978). Painted in 1926–28, it was the largest painting he had done at the time, and required 192 sittings to complete. The painting, which is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, contains the most explicit references to Dickinson's roots and loved ones. Analysis The Fossil Hunters is a dark, monochromatic scene depicting an old man and a young woman asleep in an ambiguous setting amid draperies and rocks. The word "Sheldrake," incised on rock above the old man, names a town on the west side of Saranac Lake where the young Dickinson spent summers exploring the glens near the family's summer cottage, where he hunted for fossils and to which he returned periodically as an adult to visit. The rocky ground on which the figures rest is meant to suggest this terrain. "F2," written in the sail hanging at the left, refers to Frances (Pat) Foley, his fiancé, and the letters B.D., beneath the mask of Beethoven are the initials of the artist's older brother Burgess Dickinson—known as Beethoven to his classmates at Yale—who had died by suicide in 1913. The female figure in the lower right corner was posed for by his sister, Antoinette, or "Tibi". The title refers to the fossils that Dickinson had searched for as a child in Sheldrake, and again while visiting in the summer of 1926 before starting work on the painting. A few trilobites are included, the Beethoven mask lies on a large brachiopod, and the corner of a photograph of a fossil is visible under the man's right elbow. The picture was unnamed in his letters or journals until after he had read a history of men who had developed vaccines to combat debilitating diseases, Microbe Hunters, including tuberculosis, which killed his mother. The author compared scientists searching for cures to artists and stated that the search of microbe hunters was risky, sometimes fatal. Rather than hunters, the principal figures appear to be sleeping or dead. Driscoll believes that all of the picture's imagery are "memory stimulants" and takes a passage Dickinson had underlined from Proust as the picture's inspiration. Remarkable, however, is the absence of any detail in this painting inviting association with the properties Proust singled out in the cited passage as the bearers of "the vast structure of recollection": "the smell and taste