Paul Sample

Paul Starrett Sample was born on September 14, 1896, in Louisville, Kentucky. He entered Dartmouth College in 1916, originally to study architecture, interrupting his studies to serve in the Naval Reserve during the First World War before returning to graduate in 1921.

While recovering from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, in the early 1920s, Sample studied drawing and painting under the artist Jonas Lie, an experience that turned him toward a painting career. After a short course in commercial art at the Greenleaf Art School in New York, he moved to Los Angeles in 1925, where he enrolled at the Otis Art Institute and also took classes with Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

Through the 1930s Sample built his reputation as a painter of the American Scene, depicting dairy farms, miners, barbershops, and Depression-era labor subjects in oils and watercolors, work that won prizes at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Carnegie Institute. In 1938 Dartmouth College appointed him artist-in-residence, a position he held until 1962, making him the longest-serving artist-in-residence in the college's history.

Sample died of a heart attack on February 26, 1974. Sources differ on the exact place: Wikipedia states he died in Norwich, Vermont, while the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a contemporaneous 1974 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine obituary list Hanover, New Hampshire, at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital.

Sample's reputation rests less on critical prose than on sustained institutional recognition. He won the Isidore Gold Medal at the National Academy of Design and the Temple Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, plus honors from the Carnegie Institute, and he appeared in the Corcoran Gallery of Art's Biennial nine times between 1930 and 1951. His paintings entered major public collections during his lifetime, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which purchased "Janitor's Holiday" from a 1937 National Academy of Design annual. No verifiable, exact-wording review from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. His standing is documented instead through prize records, exhibition history, and museum acquisitions across more than three decades.

Paul Sample's auction market is thin. The best-documented public result, with a confirmed auction house and sale date, is USD 19,375 for the oil painting "Icelandic Ponies Playing," sold at Heritage Auctions on November 12, 2016. A trade publication has also reported a higher price, USD 21,600, for a work titled "Reveries of an Iceland Mariner," but that report did not name the auction house or give an exact sale date, so it is noted here only as an unconfirmed higher figure. No higher, fully documented public auction result has been identified through 2026. Several established American art dealers, including Caldwell Gallery, Sullivan Goss, and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, actively handle his work on the secondary market, though no gallery or family entity identifies itself as the exclusive representative of his estate.

Collectors should treat Sample as an artist whose museum presence, spanning public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, far outweighs the depth of his auction market. Public sale records are sparse enough that a single result, such as the 2016 high of USD 19,375, should be read as one data point rather than a market trend. No catalogue raisonne has been published, so provenance and attribution should be confirmed through the galleries and museums that hold and have historically handled his work, such as Sullivan Goss, Caldwell Gallery, and Hirschl & Adler Galleries. Buyers should also confirm they are researching the American painter Paul Starrett Sample, 1896 to 1974, and not the British cartoonist of the same name (1947 to 2026), whose work appears in different market channels entirely.