The New Hope Art Colony: Elmer Schofield, Rivals

"Across the River" by Walter Schofield

"Although no correspondence between Water Schofield and Edward Redfield has come to light, they maintained a close friendship until 1904. Schofield once stated that 'the influence of one's friends, fellow painters and artists is really a very important and extremely difficult thing to assess.' In one letter to his wife he wrote: 'I went to see Redfield, spent two nights there and did a lot of camping. It really does one good to get a chance to see other men's work and mentally take notes.'

According to Redfield, he told Schofield about a landscape composition of a scene from his own front yard in Center Bridge, which he intended to create for the Carnegie Institute's annual exhibition of 1904. Schofield returned to St. Ives and created the same scene from memory, although Redfield admitted that Schofield changed the natural configuration of the landscape. What is more, Schofield apparently began to use the bold, painterly approach to landscape painting that Redfield had developed around 1900. Schofield's resulting painting, 'Across the River,' was awarded the Medal of the First Class by the Carnegie Institute in 1904. 

This greatly upset Redfield, who was on the Jury of Award for this exhibition and felt that Schofield had stolen his idea, let along his painting technique. Redfield told Schofield, 'You keep out of my front yard after this... You paint your own subjects.' After 1904 Redfield and Schofield became arch rivals, and to the best of my knowledge, Schofield did not paint in the Center Bridge or New Hope area again."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Pennsylvania Impressionists" by Thomas Folk.)