The Return

Inscriptions

Signed, lower right: Paul Sample

Label

With pilgrimage, there is a before and an after. Likely drawing from his service as a war correspondent during World War II, Paul Sample paints the poignant final stages of a soldier’s journey. Though this veteran is returning safely, muted colors and his status as the lone figure in the painting lend a melancholy mood and suggest this is not a simple image of happy homecoming.

Instead of showing the soldier welcomed home or surrounded by family, Sample depicts him approaching the outskirts of town. Telephone poles standing askew contribute a sense of unease, and gray wintery weather adds to the somber atmosphere. Combined with the vastness of the canvas, this moment on the long road home—walking from isolation to population—conveys a feeling of otherness, reflecting the strangeness of the end of a pilgrimage. One returns a changed individual, back to the known, but now with new eyes. The familiar becomes unfamiliar.

From the 2022 exhibition A Space for Dialogue 108, Journeys Beyond: Faces and Forms of Pilgrimage, curated by Emily Charland '19, Erbe Intern

Course History

WRIT 5, Expository Writing, William Craig, Winter 2014

Exhibition History

A Space for Dialogue 108, Journeys Beyond: Faces and Forms of Pilgrimage, Alvin P. Gutman Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover New Hampshire, August 27 - October 22, 2022.

American Art, Colonial to Modern, Israel Sack Gallery and Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 31, 2019-January 20, 2020.

Art for Dartmouth, Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, August 31, 2019-January 12, 2020.

Exile from Eden, Graham Gund Gallery of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, March 26-July 22, 2012.

In Residence: Contemporary Art at Dartmouth, Friends and Owen Robertson Cheatham Galleries, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 18-July 6, 2014.

Israel Sack Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 7, 2010-May 23, 2011.

Painting in the United States, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1946.

Paul Sample: Painter of the American Sceene, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, June 4-August 28, 1988.

Publication History

Robert L. McGrath and Paula F. Glick, Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene, Hanover: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 1988, p. 20, no. 89, ill.

Michael R. Taylor and Gerald Auten, In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 2013, ill. p. 34 , no. 16

Provenance

Elizabeth Dawson Goshorn (1918-19940 and Robert Musselwhite Goshorn (1919-1995); Judith D. and Charles H. Hood (1929-2016), Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, date unknown; lent to present collection, 2010; given to present collection, 2017.

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