Up Close: Frank Schoonover

This is part of an occasional series dealing with detail images of paintings featuring the brushwork of the artist. Previous posts can be found via the "Up close" topic label link on the sidebar.

The present post deals with Frank E. Schoonover (1877-1972), a student of Howard Pyle. Additional information on Schoonover can be found here, here and here.

Featured here is "Woefully Exhausted as He Was -- His Brain Was Clear: Darby's Friend" an illustration (also known as "Trapper and Mac") for the story "Mac battles for the Code" by Hubert Reginald Evans in the "American Boy" magazine's February 1929 issue.

The source of the detail images is explained below:

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The Kelly Collection has what is probably the outstanding holding of American illustration art by private individuals (not organizations). I was able to view part of it at The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California towards the end of a January 12 - March 31, 2013 exhibition run. The collection concentrates on illustration art created roughly 1890-1935 and one of its purposes is to further knowledge and appreciation of illustration from that era.

Non-flash photography was allowed, so I took a large number of high-resolution photos of segments of those original works. This was to reference the artists' techniques in a manner not always easy to obtain from printed reproductions. (However, the exhibition catalog does feature a few large-scale detail reproductions.)

I thought that readers of this blog might also be interested in seeing the brushwork of master illustrators up close to increase their understanding of how the artists worked and perhaps to serve as inspiration for their own painting if they too are artists.

Below is an image of the entire illustration coupled with my work. Click on the latter to enlarge.

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This image is from the Kelly Collection website.

Schoonover was older than the other illustrators from the Kelly exhibit shown in this Up Close series. He studied under Pyle with the likes of N.C. Wyeth whose works were also on display. Like Wyeth, Schoonover was influenced by Impressionism in that he seldom covered an area of a canvass with a single color, but instead layered his colors, sometimes over contrasting hues. For example, notice his treatment of the sky in the image above.