Samuel Bolton Colburn (1909-1993) was well-versed in the progressive modernist directions of the day as well as advanced watercolor techniques. The San Francisco art critic Alfred Frankenstein credited Colburn with a sense of drama and "as fine an eye for the subtleties of watercolor as this country has produced since [John] Marin's heyday."

Watercolor was Colburn's preferred medium. A prolific painter, he worked quickly outdoors on location, developing a style that was luminous, spontaneous and fluid, though requiring tremendous control of the medium.

Colburn developed his art during the 1930s and 1940s, a period when American Scene artists nationwide shunned abstraction and modernist experimentation and depicted rural ...