Albert Winslow Barker, printmaker, draughtsman, and educator, was born on 1 June 1874 in Chicago, Illinois to Albert and Julia Winslow Barker. His early education was provided through home study and his first formal education was at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1890 to 1895 where he studied charcoal drawings, as well as met his future wife Bess Morot. Barker was colorblind so he turned to charcoal drawing which offered its own rich range of "color." In 1993, the Academy sent two of his charcoal drawings to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Barker was an instructor at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia between 1903 and 1913. Having summers free, he traveled to Greece and Italy in the summer of 1910 and his passion for classical antiquity was aroused. In 1911, he enrolled at Haverford College where he earned his A.B. degree with honors after six years. He furthered his studies at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned a Ph.D. in Greek in 1921. During these years of study, he taught Greek at Haverford College, was an assistant professor of fine arts at Swarthmore College, and he also taught at Friends' Central School in Philadelphia. After earning his his Ph.D in Greek archaeology in 1921, he accepted the position of director of art education for the public schools of Wilmington, Delaware where he worked until 1929.

Barker’s first attempt at printmaking was etching, but he was unsatisfied with both the manner of image creation and his results. In 1926, Barker began collecting nineteenth century French lithographs; an infatuation with the medium quickly prompted him to try his hand at creating his own lithographs. He studied lithography with Bolton Brown, the master lithographer of the day, during the summer of 1927 at the Summer School of Lithography and Etching in the Catskill region of New York, learning the subtleties of drawing on limestone and printing his own editions. He advanced quickly, and was soon writing essays and articles on the lithographic technique. In 1930, he published “Lithography for Artists.”

Lithography became Barker's medium of choice and he produced over 200 hundred works. Barker’s early charcoals and lithographs are predominantly landscapes, sometimes dotted with barns or early farm equipment. By the mid-1930s, his prints include portraits of the farmers and workers of the land he loved so much. Not limited by his stark black and white palate, Barker instead filled his prints with atmosphere. The clouds reach and fill the outer limits of the print’s image, and with subtle gradation, his grassy hills stretch out in an unyielding expanse. Printing in a sort of monochromatic realism, his farm scenes show the strenuous, yet quiet life of his neighboring farmers. Barker’s prints are a tribute to the beauty of the Pennsylvanian landscape and the family farm in a time when he saw both slipping away, threatened by industrialization and the financial choke hold of the Depression.

Barker's work is represented in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum; New York Public Library; Newark Public Library, New Jersey; and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

Albert Winslow Barker died on 5 December 1947.