Paul Sample '20: Painter of the American Scene and Paragon of Diversity

From June 4 through August 28 the Hood Museum will mount the most extensive retrospective to date of the paintings of Paul Sample '20, former artist-in-residence at the College and one of the leading figures in American Regionalist painting. Alumni who are in Hanover for reunions, graduation, or vacation will want to visit the exhibition—if for no other reason than to see how well this interesting new campus facility displays important art.

But beyond that, of course, the exhibit is a way for alumni, and others, familiar with Sample to revisit his work—including his famous "Beaver Meadow." For anyone who doesn't know Sample, it is a rare opportunity for discovery.

Paul Sample, who died in 1974, embodied the diversity that Dartmouth seeks. While his primary focus was on painting—in media ranging from watercolor and oil to large-scale murals—he was a teacher of art, a dedicated fisherman and horseman, a self-taught musician, and an intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champion. Even in his art there was diversity, including many commercial commissions, and an attempt late in his career to adapt to experimental and abstract representations.

Even fans of Sample's paintings may not recall that with his younger brother Donald '2l he founded Dartmouth's Barbary Coast Band. He played saxophone. In later years he taught himself the flute, an instrument more conducive to travel.

And travel he did. While sport took him to such fishing venues as Iceland, Canada, and Montana, painting took him to Europe, of course, and to such less obvious places as the South Pacific and Cape Kennedy. For Sample was an official artist-correspondent for the U.S. Navy during WW II, and for NASA in the sixties. As Dartmouth's artist-in-residence from 1938-62 Sample was not required to conduct classes. But he did, for undergraduates and others in the community, and they were always full. One of his leading students was Peter "Mike" Gish '49, who later worked side-by-side with Sample on a major mural commission and, in 1965, was himself artist-in-residence on campus. He believes that Sample's skill as a teacher was providing students with "an atmosphere conducive to making some visible form from inner urgings. Without directing or intruding, he helped me develop my artistic calling."

For this sort of guidance, for his other contributions to Dartmouth, and in recognition of his stature as a leading American artist, the College twice awarded Sample honorary degrees, in 1936 and 1962.

For those unable to attend in person, an informative and analytical essay on the exhibition and the artist, complete with color reproductions and chronology, is available through the Hood's gift shop and through bookstores supplied by the University Press of New England.

Beaver Meadow, 1939