American Impressionist Sam Barber arrived in the United States from Europe when he was ten years old. His gift for drawing and portraiture won him a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York.  As a young student, Sam was fortunate also to supplement his class work with trips to visit important museums of Europe.  Studying the works of the Masters firsthand, he was profoundly influenced by French Impressionism, in particular the work of Monet and Degas.

A talented sculptor also, he was awarded the Helen Smith Prize for “Most Creative Composition in Sculpture” while he was a student at the National Academy of Fine Art. Today he brings to his canvases a sculptor’s understanding of mass and tactility.

In 1965, when Sam Barber was 22, the renowned Henry Hensche accepted Sam into his painting workshop at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  Sam would work there under his teacher’s guidance for nine years.  In 1974, Sam began to teach portrait and landscape painting at the Cape Cod Conservatory of Music and Fine Arts and at the Cape Cod Art Association.  He participated in many juried exhibitions, receiving the First Prize in Oil of the Cape Cod Association five times between 1974 and 1983.  He is a member of the prestigious Society of American Impressionists.

For more than thirty years, Sam Barber has lived in the Cape Cod area which, as he says “offers the artist bright sun, hazy fog, clouds, storms – sometimes all on the same day.” This setting is ideal for an artist who paints in the impressionist tradition, and Sam has found many of his subjects not too far from his New England home.  In search of inspiration, he has also visited many other regions of the U.S., the British Isles and France.  Each trip generates a series of landscapes, harbor scenes and garden settings, each glowing with his unique and subtle interplay of light, shadow, and color