The Swope Art Gallery of Art, as it was then known, purchased Creek in Winter by Paul Turner Sargent in March of 1944 after having displayed it during the winter of 1943-44 in an exhibition featuring Brown County artists. Sargent described his method of working in a letter to the curator: Creek in Winter was painted in a studio from a “sketch made from nature in the woods near my home.” Sargent was born on the family farm in Hutton Township, Coles County, Illinois, where his artistic talent was recognized and encouraged from an early age. Sargent’s affection for the environs of the farm, fields, and woods can be plainly seen in the lively brushwork and light-filled palette of his paintings. These subjects sustained him throughout a career that produced some 7,000 sketches and canvases. In 1920 he visited Brown County, where he met Adolph Shulz and joined the artist colony there. The Brown County Art Colony was by then well-established; works by members T.C. Steele, Otto Stark, and other Hoosier Impressionists are still central to the Swope’s identity.