Walter Elmer Schofield (1866 - 1944). Walter Elmer Schofield was an American Impressionist landscape and marine painter. His body of work includes autumnal landscapes and snow scenes of Pennsylvania and New England, and summery landscapes and marine paintings of England and France. Late in his career, he painted vividly-colored landscapes of the American Southwest. Although Schofield never lived in New Hope or Bucks County, he is regarded as one of the Pennsylvania Impressionists. Schofield's works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Woodmere Art Museum, and other American museums. In Europe, his works are in the collections of the Godolphin Estate in England, and the Musée d'Orsay in France. Two paintings are in the Juan Manuel Blanes Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay. The world auction record for a Schofield work was set on December 1, 2004, when Rapids in Winter sold for US$456,000 at Sotheby's NY. W. Elmer Schofield was the youngest of the eight children of Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Schofield and Mary Wollstonecraft Schofield. His parents emigrated from England to Philadelphia in 1845, and his father and uncles built textile mills in Manayunk, along the Schuylkill River. He grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and graduated from Central High School in 1886. He attended Swarthmore College for a year, before dropping out and working as a cowboy in San Antonio, Texas. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1889-92, under Thomas Anshutz and Robert Vonnoh. He moved to Paris in 1892, and studied at the Académie Julian under William Bouguereau, Gabriel Ferrier, and Henri Lucien Doucet. Schofield returned to Philadelphia at the end of 1894. Robert Henri, a friend and fellow PAFA alumnus, was then teaching at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. Schofield was among a group of Philadelphia artists; William Glackens, Edward Willis Redfield, John French Sloan, Everett Shinn, George Luks, James Moore Preston, Edward Davis, Charles Grafly, Stirling Calder, Hugh Breckenridge; who would meet at Henri's studio on Tuesday nights to discuss art and aesthetics. Schofield, Henri, Glackens, Grafly and artist Augustus Koopman sailed for France together in June 1895. Schofield, Henri and Glackens were fascinated by the subtle atmospheric effects of Dutch Old Master painters, and the trio made a bicycle tour through Belgium and the Netherlands, visiting churches and museums along the way. Schofield was also influenced by Les Nabis, a group of French painters whose work emphasized bright colors, flattened forms and decorative patterning. Schofield returned to Philadelphia in Fall 1895, and worked in his father's textile business for a short time. He met Muriel Redmayne, an English visitor to the city. They married on October 7, 1896 in Ormskirk, Lancashire. The newlyweds returned to Philadelphia, and lived with his parents in Cheltenham Township, just north of the city. They bought a house in the Oak Lane section of Philadelphia. Schofield had early professional success with restrained Pennsylvania winter landscapes, painted in a Tonalist style characterized by muted colors and soft, flowing brushwork. In 1899, he and his pregnant wife moved to Southport, North West England, and lived with her parents. The couple had two sons, Seymour and Sydney. The family lived for a time in Brittany, and from 1903 to 1907 in the coastal town of St. Ives, Cornwall. Schofield would spend half of the year in Philadelphia, painting his signature autumn and winter scenes, while his wife and sons remained in England. He maintained this routine from 1902 to 1937, except during World War I. After his parents' deaths, Schofield would stay with his brother Albert and family in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of the city. This was a short walk from the Valley Green section of Fairmount Park, and the picturesque Wissahickon Creek became the subject of a number of his paintings. Zero weather, rain, falling snow, wind—all these things to contend with only make the open-air painter love the fight. Schofield had roomed with Edward Redfield in France, and the two enjoyed a friendly rivalry. Both worked en plein air even in the coldest weather, both favored large canvases and preferred to finish a work in a single day, and the pair sometimes painted together.