Following the success of a show of Sample’s watercolors in 1940, Vose Galleries exhibited a cross section of his oil paintings in 1941, including his ever popular landscapes, portraits and genre subjects. The Vose family and Sample maintained a cordial relationship during this time, evidenced by the dozens of letters from the 1940s and 1950s found in the gallery’s archives, and several solo shows followed in 1946, 1951 and 1958. 

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The artist also regularly sent work for display, such as Just Before Winter, a view of a rural village and farmstead preparing for the cold season, which sold to a prominent Massachusetts collector in 1955 and remained off the market until the late 1980s, when the gallery once again proudly represented it. Like other landscapes Sample created at this point in his career, the painting is rendered with freer brushwork than his earlier Regionalist subjects and is composed through a series of round and angular forms bringing the focus to the natural landscape in which man coexists.  

Provenance:

From the artist
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. 18158, 1955
To private collector, Massachusetts, February 1955
Eventually to private collection, Wellesley, Massachusetts, by 1989
With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. 29698, October 1989
To collection of Abbot W. and Marcia L. Vose, Boston, Massachusetts, November 1989 to present

Labels:

Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. 18158