Biography

Born in 1961 of French-Canadian heritage, Carl Joseph Samson began his serious study of art at age fourteen with Allan R. Banks in Sandusky, OH. In 1979, he moved to Boston for a unique and rare opportunity to study under one of America’s finest painters and Boston School descendant R.H. Ives Gammell (1883-1981). Gammell is an acknowledged realist master who had trained in Paris at the Academie Julian and in Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts under Edmund Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, Philip Leslie Hale and William McGregor Paxton, progenitors of the Boston School. After Gammell's death in 1981, Carl moved to Minneapolis to continue his studies with Richard Lack, one of the most significant American realists of the second half of the 20th century. Next, Washington, D.C., and Europe became Carl's home as he researched and studied the old masters in some of the world's finest museums. Upon completing his studies, he returned to Ohio in 1986 and took up permanent residence in Cincinnati.