Training, travel and a Wilmington studio
Schoonover grew up in New Jersey and studied with Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute from 1896. Scholarships brought him to Pyle’s summer school at Chadds Ford. He moved to Wilmington and established a studio there, later teaching in the same city.
Journeys supplied sketches and photographs for his illustrations, including travel in the Hudson Bay region and time among the Blackfeet in Montana. Books and magazines carried his pictures of adventure to a wide readership. In 1912 he helped found the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, a predecessor of the Delaware Art Museum. Later work included landscape painting and restoration as well as illustration.
Selecting a moment from Mars
Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars separately credits Schoonover as illustrator. The Grosset & Dunlap copy held here is an undated reprint; its original publication statement refers to 1917 and does not make this later publisher’s copy a first edition.
In the image of Carter defending Dejah Thoris, weapons and overlapping bodies concentrate attention on the struggle. Another picture shows a crowded arrangement of chariots and larger figures above a smaller foreground figure. Its caption describes Carter searching for Dejah Thoris, so the most conspicuous seated person should not automatically be identified as the princess. Schoonover organises a particular episode through composition, while the caption and prose establish the action to which it belongs.
