Adventure pulp, March 1940 - "The Knight of Old" by Georges Surdez

So here's a bit of a pulp art mystery...

A few years ago, I bought a box lot of preliminaries by pulp artist William Fulton Soare (who studied with Harvey Dunn and Dean Cornwell in the mid-1920's). Among them were three cover preliminaries that were intended for Adventure. Two of them don't appear to have been turned into final covers, but the third is the preliminary for the March 1940 issue of Adventure, for “The Knight of Old” by Georges Surdez. Each of the prelims has "Soare" written at the bottom, and on this one, written at the top in light red pencil are the words "white background". As the scan of the Adventure cover shows, the background was indeed changed to white for the finished painting.

However, in the magazine, the cover credit doesn't go to Soare, but instead to Wesley Neff, an artist who had a short career in the pulps during the late 1930's and early 1940's. Soare died on March 1, 1940 while shoveling snow; this issue would have been on the newsstands in February 1940, so he could have painted it (and two of his Adventure covers were printed in the months after his early death at age 42). Soare did around a dozen pulp covers for Adventure, the majority of which appeared during the period from July 1938 to October 1939. Meanwhile, Wesley Neff is credited for five covers for Adventure between November 1939 and November 1940.
Soare lived in New Jersey, while Neff moved to NYC in 1936, so it's possible that they knew each other, given that they were working for some of the same publishers.

All of which leads to a bit of a mystery as to whether Soare actually painted the prelim (the lettering of his name at the bottom of the piece has similarities to the signature on his published works, but also has some differences, so it may not have been his hand but could have been added later by someone mistakenly attributing it to Soare). If he did paint the prelim, then maybe he did the final cover as well, and the magazine just printed the wrong artist credit on the contents page (which occasionally happened). It’s also possible that Soare painted the prelim but then got tied up with something and didn’t have time to do the final cover, so Adventure’s art editor reassigned it to Neff and had him complete it off of Soare’s prelim (or if Soare and Neff knew each other, maybe Neff did it as a favor to help him out). Or, if the Soare name on the prelim was added by a third party later and is in error, then both are probably by Neff.

Unfortunately, this is one of those pulp mysteries that’s likely to remain a mystery!