The reason I chose to study Harold Von Schmidt is that I really liked this specific piece. I like the colors in it and the narrative which makes me wonder what the soldiers are all looking at. There were a number of really great illustrators that caught my eye including Robert Lougheed, but I chose Harold Von Schmidt because of this one exceptionally good piece. It reminds me of a lot of my childhood watching the Dreamworks movie Spirit five times in a row. In this illustration, it is as if I can hear the jingling of the horses’ bridles and the sound of their breathing and movement. “I’m always striving to set down the tones and ringing beauty, the musical lilt, the lyric quality of a scene,” says Von Schmidt. I’m not sure how much Von Schmidt wanted or expected people to literally hear something when they look at his art, but at least for this piece, that’s what happened for me and that’s why I chose it over so many others.
Harold Von Schmidt was born in California. He was orphaned at a young age and taken in by his grandparents. His grandfather is the one who encouraged him to be creative and to experience many different things. He studied for a time under Maynard Dixon, and later under Howard Pyle and Harvey Dunn; it was through his schooling that his illustration career began to flourish. Von Schmidt went to illustrate the magazine covers of Colliers, the Cosmopolitan, and the Saturday Evening Post. During WWII, Von Schmidt became a war correspondent and documented it in his artwork. When the war moved to Japan, Von Schmidt enjoyed illustrating the US soldiers as foreigners doing everyday tasks. I think that his influence was mostly from what he did in the war. That is what most people were concerned with at the time and the only lens they could see the battleground from was from that of war correspondents who made illustrations of it for the public. He also heavily influenced the way people would think about the west because of his illustrations of cowboys and their lives.
I myself am influenced by Harold Von Schmidt through his use of color and his placement of subjects. I think that his compositions are genius and are always engaging to the viewer. I particularly like his use of atmospheric perspective. I think in practice this technique, I will be able to effectively utilize it in my own work. Von Schmidt has some obvious expertise depicting horses which will influence the way I depict them. Horses are a common subject that Von Schmidt paints and I admire the way he structures the legs and the rest of the horse’s body to help tell the story while still letting the horse be a horse.