Stephen Alonzo Schoff

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Stephen Alonzo Schoff was born in Danville, Vermont, 16 January, 1818 and grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts. He took up engraving at age 16 as an apprentice under Oliver Pelton, of Boston, and then studied under Joseph Andrews, a more accomplished Boston engraver, in whose company in 1840 he visited Europe. There he spent about two years in Paris, studying drawing at the school of Hippolyte Delaroche, and perfecting himself in his art. While in Europe he befriended Asher B. Durand and John Frederick Kensett.

On his return to the United States he was soon was employed upon his first important work, "Caius Marius on the Ruins of Carthage," after John Vanderlyn. This plate was issued about 1843 by the Apollo Association (later known as the American Art-Union). Before the government established a bureau of engraving Mr. Schoff was employed by the Continental Bank Note Co. and the American Bank Note Co. of New York. He was also employed at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing for three or four years.

Schoff befriended the American artist William Morris Hunt during the 1860's and engraved or etched a number of plates after Hunt's works. It is through his portraits that Schoff received some of his highest praise. His portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson after a sketch by Samuel W. Rowse was considered one of his best. Among his other noteworthy portraits are Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emanuel Swedenborg and a self-portrait after a W.H.W. Bicknell photograph.

His work took on a freer, looser appearance in the later part of the Nineteenth Century. Schoff’s expertise with the engraver’s burin allowed him to adapt to the newer forms of etching that were then becoming popular. He remained productive until two years prior to his death in Norfolk, Conn. on May 6, 1904.

Schoff lived in a number of locations including New York, Washington D.C., Conn., and Vermont, but for most of his life he resided in Newton, Massachusetts. He was a long-standing member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in Newton.

Schoff received his greatest recognition in 1979, some 75 years after his death, when the Smithsonian Institution presented an exhibition entitled “An Engraver’s Potpourri, The Life and Times of a 19th Century Banknote Engraver” with a collection of prints and engravings he collected during his lifetime. The Smithsonian still maintains a “Schoff Collection” as part of their “150 Years of Print Collecting at the Smithsonian” exhibit. There are also large collections of his work housed in the print rooms of the Library of Congress, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the New York Public Library.