406 Federal Street, Dover, Delaware
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Delaware artist Frank Schoonover (1877-1972) is well known for his career as an illustrator.  His pictures appear in over one hundred books and more than thirty periodicals.  To complement the Biggs Museum's extensive holdings of Schoonover's work, previous annual exhibitions of borrowed paintings have featured his early work and classic illustrations.  The 2000 theme concentrated on the lesser-known Delaware and Pennsylvania landscapes that Schoonover painted throughout his life..

Although Frank Schoonover traveled widely in the United States and Canada, he had an affinity for the local landscapes of the Delaware and Brandywine river valleys.  Born August 19, 1877 in Oxford, New Jersey, he and his family settled in Trenton, New Jersey near the Delaware River.  As a youth he spent part of each summer with his grandmother in Bushkill, Pike County, Pennsylvania.  In a 1958 letter, Schoonover reminisced that this time at Bushkill “was the beginning of my making pictures of bridges and streams.”

During the summers of 1898 and 1899, when Schoonover attended Howard Pyle's summer art school at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, he continued painting landscapes.  In 1898 he sold his first painting, a landscape of the Brandywine, which was part of a student exhibition at Turner's Mills.  In 1914 Schoonover returned to the site of his early artistic inspiration and acquired his first summer studio on the second floor of Hemingway's Mill in Bushkill, Pennsylvania.  Later, he built a larger summer studio there on his own property. In the late 1930s after the decline in the popularity of illustration, Schoonover devoted himself almost exclusively to landscape painting.

To further the study of the art of Frank E. Schoonover, his grandchildren, John, Louise, and Cortlandt, Jr. have established the Schoonover Fund, Inc. and begun the major project of producing a catalogue raisonnè with the goal of including all the artist's works, over 2500 of them.  Fortunately he kept a daybook in which he recorded the works he created and assigned a number to each of them.  Even the landscapes painted for pleasure are listed.  To publicize the venture and to make it simple for those who own Schoonover paintings to add these to the catalogue, the project will be on the world wide web.  The site is under development.  However, if you know of Schoonover works and want to let the team know about them now, you can send information to PO Box 3686, Wilmington, DE, 19807 or e-mail to [email protected].