Stephen Alonzo Schoff was one of America's best known engravers of the 19th Century. He was also employed as a bank note engraver.
Background
Stephen Alonzo was born on January 16, 1818 in Danville, Vermont, United States, third of the eight children of John Chase and Eunice (Nye) Schoff, Stephen removed with his parents, when he was about eight years old, to Bradford on the Merrimack, and subsequently to Newburyport, Massachussets, the latter place being chosen because of its superior schools.
Education
At sixteen he was indentured for five years to Oliver Pelton, a Boston engraver, but after three years, dissatisfied with his progress, he went to Joseph Andrews to study. To him, said Schoff, "I owe more than can ever be repaid".
Career
Schoff and Joseph Andrews, going to Paris in 1839 or 1840, worked for a while in the studio of Paul Delaroche.
On returning to the United States in 1842, Schoff found employment in banknote work, and at the same time, with the aid of A. B. Durand, who did some work on the plate, he executed his "Caius Marius on the Ruins of Carthage, " after the painting by Vanderlyn, for publication by the Apollo Association. An interesting and illuminating contrast is offered by Schoff's much later engraving after the "Bathers" of William Morris Hunt, in which the line is freely and spiritedly varied, broken and twisted to translate the tones, colorvalues, even brush-marks, of the painting. In this departure from conventions one may find an aim akin to that of the "new school" of American wood engraving of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Next to this interpretation of Hunt, almost a tour de force, there may be set the same engraver's "Bay of New York, " after G. L. Brown, of a delicacy that reminds one of the plates by British engravers after Turner for Samuel Rogers' Italy. Like many engravers of his time, he, too, had to turn his hands to minor jobs in the day's work. But plates such as those of his mentioned above are outstanding, as are his engravings of portraits such as those of William Penn and R. W. Emerson (after S. W. Rowse).
He also engraved some of F. O. C. Darley's illustrations, and during the etching vogue of the eighties he reproduced paintings in etching, to which process he brought rich experience. He lived at different times in Boston, Washington, New York, Newtonville, Massachussets, and Brandon, Vermont, and died in Norfolk, Connecticut.
Achievements
Works
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Religion
Schoff was a long-standing member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church.
Connections
Schoff was married on November 7, 1843, in Williamsburg, to Maria Josephine Rosalina Hastings (1824 - 82), by whom he had five children.