Abstract:
Paul Starrett Sample (1896–1974) was an artist of the American Scene movement who worked primarily in Los Angeles, California, and Hanover, New Hampshire. He produced paintings that were revered in his lifetime but mostly forgotten in later art-historical scholarship. Sample’s body of work offers considerable insight into the art of the 1930s and 1940s, since he was involved in nearly every facet of American art. He showed paintings in prominent exhibitions, connected with Regionalist and California School artists, created murals for businesses and New Deal programs, produced illustrations for leading magazines, taught at the University of Southern California, served at Dartmouth as one of the first artist-in-residents in the United States, and worked as an artist-correspondent for LIFE magazine during World War II.
Sample’s artwork is part of a larger discourse on masculinity. During the Great Depression and World War II, he continually represented scenes of male camaraderie, which seems to have had a powerful personal resonance for him. Sample was a gifted athlete who led an active life as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College but later had to abandon physical activity due to illness. Shortly after graduation he and his younger brother Donald were diagnosed with tuberculosis; they spent over four years together in a rest cure at a sanatorium, but Donald died of the disease. This emotional trauma influenced the way Sample would depict men in his American scenes. Unlike most other painters and muralists of the 1930s who portrayed American men as muscular, heroic figures, Sample represented them as downtrodden, frustrated, or idling. Sample’s paintings offer a different view of masculinity—a definition that is rooted in listlessness and leisure rather than in physicality and work.
Sample produced his most notable paintings during the 1930s when he lived in Southern California. This dissertation revisits those paintings and reconsiders their Regionalist context, demonstrating why it is important to see America and its art through the work of Paul Sample and why he is a significant figure to American art.