Historical Society of Delaware - Howard Schroeder's Delaware Exhibition

Howard Schroeder's Delaware
An Artist's Fifty-Year Vision

Note: This exhibit is CLOSED. For reference only.

through February 1998
at the

Delaware History Museum
Gallery 2
505 Market Street
Wilmington, Delaware

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From October 10th, 1997,through February 28th, 1998, the Delaware History Museum is displaying an exhibition devoted to the work of Howard Schroeder (1910- 1995), a painter who recorded the changing life of southern Delaware for a period of fifty years, beginning in the 1940s. A commercial artist from New York City, Schroeder was stationed at Lewes, Delaware's Fort Miles during the Second World War. He fell in love with the area and made it his home for the rest of his life. His paintings illustrate the evolution of Lewes and other nearby fishing villages from quiet commercial ports to bustling vacation communities, in the process documenting a vanishing way of life.

A teacher as well as a working artist, Howard Schroeder traveled the Delmarva Peninsula, offering art instruction from Smyrna to Seaford to Salisbury. From the mid-1940s to the late-1970s he sold art supplies, gifts, and his own paintings at The Art Age, his Rehoboth Beach shop. In 1987, forty-five years after first setting foot in Lewes, he was honored with a segment on CBS's "Sunday Morning" television program.

Several themes are emphasized in the exhibition, beginning with World War II and Schroeder's experiences with mine-laying vessels, whose job was to protect the mouth of Delaware Bay from enemy ships. His largest surviving painting, the thirty-square-foot Planting a Mine is featured here, as is a copy of the July 6, 1942, issue of Life magazine illustrating a similar composition that won Schroeder a prize in the magazine's Art Competition for Men in the Armed Forces. After the War Schroeder concentrated on scenes of Lewes and of commercial fishing boats, both of which are dominant subjects in the exhibition. Views of "My Motif," a group of three favorite Victorian houses on the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal, illustrate both Schroeder's variety of styles and techniques and the evolution of the buildings themselves. The artist was an early supporter of the Rehoboth Art League, and several of his canvases picturing League activities are grouped together. A series of portraits of Schroeder's family rounds out the exhibition, with the focus on a startlingly bright self-portrait, "Searching for Color and Incidentally Getting a Bit of Me."

Seventy-five works comprise the show. Oil paintings and watercolors receive equal emphasis, a few linoleum block prints are included, and even one of the artist's paint boxes is on display, along with small sketches from his notebooks. "I feel freer [painting] outdoors," declared Howard Schroeder. Come to the Delaware History Museum and enjoy his fifty-year passion for the Delaware landscape.

Illustration: Proud Sails, Lewes, Delaware, late 1940s, oil on canvasboard, 12" x 18"; Schroeder's "motif" comprises the three Victorian houses in the center.