Samuel Lewis Francis, known as Sam Francis, was born in 1923 in San Mateo, California. At the outset, he began studying medicine and psychology. In 1943, he enlisted in the Army as an aviator, but in 1944, his plane crashed in the desert during a training session. Wounded, he was hospitalized for two years. It was during his hospitalization that the trigger for painting happened. He will say especially, "my painting came from the accident". On leaving the hospital, he began studying art at Berkeley, and in 1946 he moved to San Francisco to study at Clyfford Still.

He moved to Paris around 1948 to 1949, and met several American artists there, painters we qualify today as 'action painters', who will complete Francis' approach. On large format canvases, he borrowed and blended their various techniques: dripping all over, even calling it tachiste, a name that refers to the chance of creation: the shape is stain, subject to chance and emerged spontaneously. Similar to spots, any element allowing an interpretation having been eliminated, only remaining depth: "Depth is all." He will remain for more than 10 years in France (Paris, South of France), until 1961. His first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1952. In the second half of the 60s, Sam Francis made paintings of colored smoke, projected in the sky by helicopters. In the 70s, the artist became interested in Jungian theory of the unconscious, to the esoteric, and painted more suggestive canvases. Sam Francis died in Santa Monica (USA) in 1994.