American Masterpieces from Dryads Green Gallery
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Artist Name:       Walter Elmer Schofield
Artist Dates:        1867 - 1944
Painting Title:     Lily Pond at Godolphin
Painting Date:      1939
Medium:             Oil on Canvas
Signature:            Inscribed Verso
Provenance:       Artist Family, Christie's
Condition:           Good
Size Unframed:    30 x 36
Size Framed:        37 1/2 x 43 3/4
Frame Condition:  Mint Reproduction
Artist Best Price:   $456,000
Our Price:           SOLD
Curator's Comments: Walter Elmer Schofield  attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, studying with Thomas Anshutz from 1889-92, before leaving for the Academie Julian in Paris. Although he became an expatriate, settling in Cornwall's St. Ives art colony, Schofield was recognized as part of the Pennsylvania Impressionist tradition, and continued to exhibit extensively in the U.S. He maintained close relations with the Philadelphia Gang, touring the Low Countries with Henri and Glackens, and corresponding with Sloan, a far lesser painter who ironically wrote to Henri that Schofield's work was  "remarkably knowing for a  landscape bird."

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. 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 residence at his son's Godolphin House estate in England. These are in the "green variance" mode, which saw Schofield limit his palette, to a spectrum of green hues, along with his typical whites and cobalt blues--to produce genuine magnificence. Our work, as it hangs, seems to open an actual window drawing us into the pond's perfect serenity. This is a superb painting that exhibits an endless fascination with the true beauty of nature's imperfect perfection--really a joy to behold.
         
A handwritten letter on Godolphin House stationery from Schofield's grandson, himself an art critic of note, documents the painting, along with photos of the property and the site of the pond, and adds that the painting was completed on the day of the German invasion of Poland. Additionally, Schofield inscribed the painting on the reverse:"Lily Pond--Godolphin--Sept--9th--'39" and signed it "Schofield."
Also from the Godolphin period,The Kings Garden, brought over $25,000 in 2003.The five tallest trees in the background are the lilly pond's birches.
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