was his brother, that it expressed a wish that he could have saved his brother's life when he leaped from Edwin's sixth floor apartment. He argues that the dream has a specific art reference to John Singleton Copley's painting, Watson and the Shark, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It depicts the young Brook Watson being rescued from a shark (and from drowning) in Havana Harbor. Dickinson may well have intended the painting he was about to be a means of "rescuing" Burgess through art. The following March, Dickinson wrote that he was given a death mask of Beethoven. Significantly, the death mask shows his eyes closed. Dickinson opened the eyes in his painting, and in so doing, not only immortalized his brother, but gave him back the life he remembered him having. Adler sees the old man as holding a stick (a symbolic paintbrush) to the grindstone as expressing the artist's "'labor' to give birth to something eternal," as signified by the fossil-like Beethoven mask by his hand, the reference to a hunt for fossils referring to this desire to leave behind remains—art—that will survive death, as a woman's children outlive her. Dickinson himself admitted that the desire to make something as lasting as the work of the old masters was manifested in the size of the work (at 96½ inches high it was the largest painting he had done). Exhibition history The Fossil Hunters achieved considerable notoriety when exhibited at the Carnegie International of 1928, because it was hung sideways, a mistake perpetuated by subsequent exhibitions in 1929 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (where the error was caught before the opening) and in New York at the National Academy of Design, where it created an even greater uproar by winning a prize in its disoriented condition. Notes References Abell, Mary Ellen and Helen Dickinson Baldwin. Edwin Dickinson: The Provincetown Years, 1912–1937. Exhibition catalogue, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, 2007. Adler, Eliot. "Observations on Edwin Dickinson." Edited with notes by Matthew Baigell. Arts Magazine, 56, no 8 (April 1982): 124-126. Baldwin, Helen Dickinson. "Chronology," in Douglas Dreischpoon et al. Edwin Dickinson: Dreams and Realities. Exhibition catalogue, New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, 2002. Carmean Jr., E.A., Eliza E. Rathbone, Thomas B. Hess. American Art at Mid-Century: The subjects of the Artist. Exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of