Samuel F. Hershey (1904-1987)

Jack of many trades, Samuel F. Hershey was a painter, craftsman, and dedicated teacher during his relatively short life.  Born in Indiana, he moved early to go to university on the East Coast. He studied architecture at MIT, and art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Boston Museum School, where he was strongly influenced by Aldro Hibbard and Lester Stevens.  A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, he soon settled in Rockport, Massachusetts, a thriving artists’ colony, where he joined the dynamic Rockport and North Shore Arts Associations. He also had an association with the Hoosier Salon, where he won the Butler Prize, and was employed as a muralist for the WPA. Today, one of his murals remains in the Rockport Public Library. 

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In addition to painting, Hershey taught architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for five years, was an instructor at the Smith College Graduate School of Architecture, lectured at the University of California at Berkeley, and, in his later years, taught at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He is admired, not surprisingly, for the modernist and architectural elements in his work

Hershey won many prizes and exhibited widely, at such venues as the Corcoran Gallery, the National Academy of Design, the Rockport and North Shore Arts Associations, and many others.  

References: See Who Was Who In American Art (1999).  Artists of the Rockport Art Association, compiled by Kitty Parsons Recchia, 1940.