Early Winter Morning

Early Winter Morning is the type of monumental landscape that made Schofield’s reputation. He depicts a view that he must have sketched while standing on the manmade embankment of an industrial canal as it arrives at its junction with the Delaware River. Such canals snaked their way across Pennsylvania, a network of waterways that connected the natural resources of the western part of the state—coal, wood, slate, and stone—with the markets in East Coast cities. Schofield’s subject is not the romance of wild nature, but the pathos and resilience of land as stripped by winter and shaped by modern industry.  

A leading figure of American Impressionism, Schofield was born in Philadelphia. After briefly attending Swarthmore College, he worked as a cowboy in Texas, where ranch hands encouraged him to pursue art. He went on to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Académie Julian in Paris, where he studied French Impressionism. In 1902 he settled in St. Ives, Cornwall, painting its rugged coasts and harbors while returning to Pennsylvania in the winters. 

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