Featured Work
Exhibitions
March 27, 2020 - June 30, 2020
American Masters: Art of the 20th – 21st Centuries
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Frank Schoonover was an illustrator of the West and a student of Howard Pyle. Schoonover experienced the wilderness early in life and felt a very special attraction to it. “Woods, streams, bridges, nature, the wilderness—they are all in my work,” Schoonover later wrote, “and the people I painted are rugged as their environment.” He was enamored with the color red and in each of his illustrations he tried, wherever possible, to put in a dash of cadmium red, varnished it more heavily than elsewhere to heighten its intensity.
Like Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, Schoonover’s understanding of the rugged life made him a prime candidate for illustrating classic tales of adventure. Among them: Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and Ivanhoe.
He illustrated more than two hundred classic books, and with classmate Gayle Hoskins, organized the Wilmington Sketch Club in 1925.
Exhibitions with Somerville Manning Gallery
2020 American Masters: Art of the 20th – 21st Centuries