In 1928 Dickinson married Frances "Pat" Foley, shortly after the completion of The Fossil Hunters, an 8 feet painting on which he spent 192 sittings and that 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) Dickinson.