Howard Schroeder watercolor paper, 25 x 21 inches. Provenance: private owner.
Biography: 1910 - 1995. Howard Stephen Schroeder was born in New York City on December 17, 1910. He was the only child of Stephen and Lillie Mae Schroeder. He made the art of drawing a part of his life early on (by age 7) but said that his father indulged the activity as more a hobby to be later outgrown.Through Junior High School he lived in the Bronx where he attended P.S. 46. A teacher there encouraged him in his artistic pursuits. His family then crossed the Hudson to Englewood, New Jersey where he received his first formal art training and had his first commercial successes. In 1929 he enrolled at Syracuse University, the alma mater of his high school art teacher, andbegan study under Professor Witherspoon, the third and most influential of his teachers. Howard then left Syracuse to take up study at the National Academy of Design in New York City. During most of the '30s he worked as a commercial artist.Drafted into the army as America entered World War II, Schroeder was assigned first to Fort Dix, New Jersey and then, early in 1942, to Fort Miles in Lewes (pronounced "Lewis"), Delaware. Schroeder soon after married Marian Meta Mohnkem (in July 1942) and brought his new bride to the Lewes/Rehoboth area. There he spent the rest of the war laying anti-submarine mines in Delaware Bay. By 1945 when the war ended, Lewes had become home and they decided to stay permanently.The Schroeders then opened a store in Rehoboth Beach to sell art supplies and Howard's paintings. He supplemented that income teaching small classes that he established in nearby Maryland and Virginia and in Delaware. He later taught for six years at St. Andrews School in Middletown, Delaware.Schroeder's early paintings are clearly "Regionalist", and it could be said that he and his friend Jack Lewis were leading Delaware Regionalists of the 1940s. But the work of both artists, each influencing the other, evolved in the direction of abstraction and seemed to employ ever more Cezannesque Cubism in later decades. This was especially true of the work of HowardSchroeder who also came under the influence of watercolorist John Marin. He painted mostly the area's fishing boats and fishermen, its marshes, coastal scenes and its people in a variety of indoor and outdoor social activities. But he also focused often on his wife and six children as subjects and searched out subject matter abroad.He was consistent as an artist, painting always professionally, boldly and with extraordinary skill and insight. His paintings are not dated. History is the worse for that, having been ill-served. Schroeder addressed this when he wrote, "I wish I had dated my work, but I didn't. I had some built-in psychological reason, like maybe I wanted to stand on each picture and not on dates." Of course, some can be dated by what they do (and do not) depict, but any attempt to understand the development of this artist is seriously impeded at the outset by that curious decision consciously made long ago.Howard Schroeder died in Lewes, Delaware on September 8, 1995.

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