Frank E. Schoonover was born in 1877 in New Jersey. It was the perfect time and the perfect place. In 1896, he was accepted to the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, where Howard Pyle was teaching illustration one day a week. In 1897, the course was divided into two parts, with Pyle teaching the advanced students. Schoonover was one of the fortunate ones who "graduated" to the Pyle class. Others were Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet and Thornton Oakley, and Stanley M. Arthurs.
Schoonover was not an immediate success. He was mainly self-taught and had been planning to become a minister when he saw the Drexel ad for the Illustration Class. Despite his lack of technical skills, Pyle saw his raw brilliance and encouraged him to audit classes. Stuck in the rear of the classrooms, he and Arthurs became fast life-long friends and, oddly enough, both became friends and confidants of Pyle (that's Pyle and Frank at left - I cropped Stanley out of the picture). Schoonover improved quickly and he was proficient enough to win one of the ten prized scholarships to the Chadds Ford Summer classes in 1898 and 1899. There Pyle tutored the most developed students and the class size was limited. Entrance by means of one of the scholarships was very prestigious. By the second year, Pyle had secured work for Schoonover and he was illustrating books: A Jersey Boy of the Revolution and In the Hands of the Red Coats, both in 1899.

Pyle resigned from Drexel in 1900 and built his own school next to his studio. Schoonover (and Arthurs) came along. The excursions to Chadds Ford on the Brandywine River continued. Schoonover relished the outdoor experiences. He had been attracted to the fields and streams as a young boy and some of his earliest memories and drawings were of those subjects. Pyle's tutelage reinforced that bent and his earliest commissions were for outdoor adventure stories like In The Open by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews (at right) from the July 1903 issue of Scribner's Magazine.

1903 also saw his first major exploratory expedition into the wilds. For four months, by foot and dog sled he explored 1200 miles of eastern Canadian wilderness. The experience and the material he gleaned from it were the grist for a series of illustrated essays/stories that ran in Scribner's in 1905 and an inspiration for the rest of his life. At left is a plate from The Edge of the Wilderness in the April issue. Another episode, Breaking Trail, appeared in May. Both images are reproduced from the printed source and can be compared with reproductions from originals in Frank Schoonover - Illustrator of the North American Frontier. Books and assignments flowed to him. He took every opportunity to go "on location" to soak up the atmosphere and local color. In fact, for all his obvious abilities, he apparently found it easier to draw a subject which he was looking at than to make one up. The Deliverance by Ellen Glasgow required a trip to the tobacco fields of Virginia. Other early work necessitated journeys to Denver, Butte, New Orleans, and anywhere he could go "out West."

He maintained his studio at Pyle's school until 1906. By that time he was a member of the Society of Illustrators, had his first fiction published (both in 1905) and had traveled to Jamaica with Pyle and Arthurs. In March 1906, he moved to his own studio in Wilmington Delaware where he worked for the rest of his career.

And what a career! From 1903 to 1913 he was a regular contributor to all the great illustrated magazines of the day: Century, Harpers', McClure's, Scribner's, etc. He worked for Outing Magazine where he illustrated covers and the works of Jack London and Henry Van Dyke. Other famous authors whose stories and books he illustrated include Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars from 1917 at right), Rex Beach, Zane Grey, Robert W. Chambers, Gilbert Parker, Henry Van Dyke, etc. He was well known for his images for Clarence Mulford's Hopalong Cassidy stories.

At the time of Pyle's death in 1911, Schoonover was one the premier illustrators of his day (the others were almost all Pyle students, too - most noticeably Wyeth and Parrish). In 1910 he and Arthurs had assisted Pyle on the Hudson County Courthouse Murals. He created wonderful color-plate books for Penn Publishing, including With Cortes the Conqueror (1917) and Joan of Arc (1918) as well as a series of war drawings (see sample above) done for the monthly Ladies' Home Journal. All these assignments certainly proved that he had learned to "make up" a picture.

For Harper's, he did a single illustration for each of the following titles. Each was used as dust jacket, onlaid color cover plate and frontispiece. Interior illustrations were in b&w by Louis Rhead for most of the series.

Following in the Pyle tradition of historical subjects, he did three great biographical books for Penn: Lafayette (1921), Washington (1925), and Lincoln (1928) - all written by Lucy Foster Madison. Pyle's piratical subjects may have influenced other titles including Blackbeard Buccaneer (at left - reproduced in b&w in the book) (1922), Privateers of '76 (1923), Barbary Bo (1929), To Have and To Hold (1931), Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters (1931) and Crimson Cutlass (1933). There were dozens of other titles, most situated in the wilds or focused around outdoor adventure, like The Flamingo Feather and Ivanhoe (both 1923) and Sled Trails and White Waters (1929). It's obvious to me that Schoonover was following in his mentor's footsteps and would continue to do so for his entire career. I can't think of another artist who carried the Pyle banner as long and as proudly as he did.

from Yankee Ships in Pirate Waters

Unable to shrug off Pyle's influence, he started his own school in Wilmington in 1942 which lasted almost 25 years. If you're doing the math here, you'll realize that Schoonover had a long, productive life. A stroke in 1968 forced him to stop painting and to close the school. He died in 1972 at the age of 95, outliving even the venerable Parrish by six years.

Information supplied by: http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/schoonov.htm