Hopalong Takes Command
Schoonover, Frank Earle, American illustrator, painter, 1877-1972
1905
oil on canvas
Bequest of Joseph Bancroft, 1942


Frank Schoonover studied illustration with Howard Pyle at Drexel Institute in 1896 and later as an advanced student in Wilmington. In 1905 he was commissioned by Outing magazine to make two illustrations for Clarence Mulford’s story “The Fight at Buckskin,” a Wild West saga featuring Hopalong Cassidy. Seeking authenticity in the illustrations, Outing’s editors sent Schoonover west to sketch and photograph the cowboy life. The illustration is based on one of these photographs that Schoonover colored and sent to his art editor for approval. Schoonover’s daybook records that Hopalong Takes Command was painted in August of 1905 over a six-day period in his Wilmington studio.’ Though his general composition was drawn from the photograph, he also hired a model who posed wearing some of the Western gear that Schoonover had collected.

The popular serialized version of the Hopalong story was published in book form under the title Bar-20 in 1906. Hopalong Takes Command served as a frontispiece, with four additional works by Schoonover and two by N. C. Wyeth. The leading character, Hopalong, was an ornery cowboy who walked with a limp, drank “red—eye,” and spit tobacco juice. He is shown seated on the window ledge of a barn during a gun fight which erupted after a barroom quarrel in Buckskin, Arizona. According to the text, “He was the only one of his crowd to carry a second cartridge strap. It hung over his right shoulder and rested on his left hip, holding one hundred cartridges and his second Colt.”2 In the movies starring William Boyd in the 1940s, the character of Hopalong Cassidy became idealized into a hero astride a white horse.

Source: American Painting and Sculpture catalog. Elizabeth H. Hawkes, Assistant Curator