The Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover has acquired three major pieces to add to its collection of American artwork.
Delaware artist Mary Paige Evans; recently honored with a retrospective at the Delaware Art Museum, gifted the Biggs with a triptych of her painted seascapes entitled “Horizontal Sea Series.”
The museum also acquired a painting by Rockland, Delaware’s Peter Sculthorpe and an early piece by Frank E. Schoonover, locally known as the “Dean of Delaware artists.”
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Schoonover’s 1906 painting, “The American Way” is an early example of the artist’s illustration work.
Schoonover was a prolific contributor to twentieth century publications and studied under Howard Pyle alongside fellow illustrator, N. C. Wyeth.
Biggs Museum curator Ryan Grover, says the painting reveals Schoonover’s mastery at composition.
“Schoonover is really great at creating this sort of beautiful visual narrative of tension in his work and this was just another sort of trick that he used to create that tension," said Grover. "If you think about the painting as a window, it looks like these characters are moving from a distance further away towards the viewer.”
His grandson John Schoonover, says the piece depicts life along along the Rio Grande river and was commissioned by Century Illustrated Magazine, one of many popular illustrated periodicals at the turn of the century..
“In fact my grandfather had gone out west to do a lot of research for several articles and this painting is a very good example of his style in the early days of his illustration of a very bold light in the background of the painting and the darker areas in the front.”
The Biggs Museum is home to one of the largest collections of Frank E. Schoonover paintings in the country.
This piece is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
