American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery (Please Scroll Down--Catalogue is Alphabetical by Artist Last Name)

Artist Name:       Walter Elmer Schofield Artist Dates:        1867 - 1944 Painting Title:      Coast of Cornwall Painting Date:      Ca. 1925 Medium:             Oil on Canvas Signature:            Signed Lower Right Provenance:         Private Collection Condition:            Excellent Size Unframed:    26 x 30 Frame Condition:  Newcomb Macklin Artist Best Price:   $456,000 Offered At:          $65,000

Curator's Comments: In 1895 with his charismatic and influential friend, Robert Henri, and fellow art student, William Glackens, Schofield, starting from Paris, cycled round Holland and Belgium to view the Dutch masters. This was the trip that established him as the "landscape bird," among the Philadelphia Gang. The phrase comes from a letter from Sloan to Henri, where the far lesser painter calls Schofield's work  "remarkably knowing for a  landscape bird." And indeed Schofield ranks with Redfield as one of the leading American impressionist landscape painters. He was born on September 10, 1867 in Philadelphia.  His parents had emigrated from England, and Schofield descended from an illustriously creative family; his mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Schofield, was the grand-niece of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Not enjoying the best of health as a child, he was sent out West by his father to toughen him up, and, for eighteen months in 1884-5, he lived the life of a cowboy.  Schofield  attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, studying with Thomas Anshutz from 1889-92, before leaving for the Academie Julian in Paris, where he studied under Bouguereau, Ferrier, and Doucet, but his travels in France and especially Brittany fired his enthusiasm for Impressionism. In October 1897, he married Muriel Redmayne, whom he had met initially in Philadelphia.  In 1901, they emigrated to England, living initially in Southport, Muriel's former hometown.  In 1903, now with two young sons, they  moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where they stayed for four years, during which time he was instrumental not only in recommending St Ives to other American artists, including George Oberteuffer, but also in getting work by his St Ives friends, particularly Hayley Lever, hung in American shows.  His focus on landscape painting intensified, and at St Ives  he was influenced by the plein-air approach of the artist colony. He adopted a broader view and lighter palette, and proclaimed to his compatriots: “Zero weather, rain, falling snow, wind - all of these things to contend with only make the open-air painter love the fight...He is an open-air man, wholesome, healthy, hearty, and his art, sane and straightforward, reflects his temperament.”  In addition, Schofield started to use huge canvases for his outdoor works, and the result was panoramic landscapes, boldly and expansively painted.

The Artist, ca. 1925

"Cornish Coast brought" $43,000 in 2008

Inscribed

Click here for additional images and details of the Newcomb Macklin frame

Schofield made more than forty crossings of the Atlantic by steamer, and, between 1902 and 1937, the only years when he did not visit the U.S. were the War years. He always favoured the American exhibition circuit and American patrons and, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, he became regarded as one of the top-ranking American landscape painters and is now lauded as one of the most important of the American Impressionists.  His medal tally at American and International exhibitions is impressive and include a ‘Mention Honorable’ at the Paris Salon in 1900,  a Gold Medal at the 1910 Buenos Aires Exhibition, the Medal of Honour from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and a silver medal at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. in 1926.  In fact, the Corcoran held three one-man exhibitions of his work in 1912, 1920 and 1931. In 1904, his "Center Bridge, Across the River," earned a Carnegie Institute medal, establishing him as a talent that would continue to flourish and evolve, until it came to dominate pre-WWII American landscape painting. In 1921, he returned to Cornwall, living at Doreen Cottage in Perranporth for four years, but Schofield spent as much as nine months a year in America, painting with the New Hope school in his home state of Pennsylvania, and in California, Arizona and New Mexico, where he painted scenes of the American West.  However, when his son, Sidney, in 1937, purchased Godolphin House, the impressive manor dating from the 15th century, near Helston, he could not resist the lure of Cornwall again, and he and his wife moved in during the autumn of 1938.  In 1941, after his son’s marriage, he moved to Gwedna House, a smaller residence on the estate, where he died from a heart attack in 1944. Schofield is best known for his virile and vigorously brushwork, best seen in his snow scenes, painted in Bucks County and in his marine landscapes painted in Cornwall. Schofield went from the impressionism of his 1914 American masterpiece "The Rapids,"  which hangs in the Smithsonian, to the unique modernism that characterizes his final nature paintings, done during his Godolphin period. These later works are in a new impressionist mode, which saw Schofield limit his palette, to a spectrum of green hues, along with his typical whites, blacks and cobalt blues--to produce genuine magnificence. There is much insight in Schofield's remark that "nature is always vital, even in her implicit moods and never denies a vision" to the artist. He was fascinated by the rocky coast of Cornwall--where the Atlantic grinds against the final edge of the European tectonic plate with massive strength. Cornwall, like the French corniche, is derived from the Celtic cornu, or horn, here meaning promontory, or headland, and the province itself is  a rocky thrust into the Atlantic from England's southwest tip. Schofield catches that grinding process of sea on stone, a vast "mill" in the oldest English poems, as nature paints and impressionist rendering of the endlessly forming multiple planes of rock faces covered with watery weed that signals its endless vitality. Our work is a superb painting that exhibits an endless fascination with nature's imperfect perfection and the magnificence it creates.

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