He learned not only the technical aspects of painting, but also made detailed studies of the 17th-century Dutch landscape artists Meindert Hobbema and Jacob van Ruisdael.

He reputation continued to grow and in 1822 he was given the rank of Fourth Class Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Institute.

His sketchbook Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth) shows that he made about twenty paintings a year, among them a few foreign views.

Schelfhout provided training to many painters who would become famous in their own right : Johan Jongkind (one of the forerunners of the Impressionists), Charles Leickert, Johannes Josephus Destree, Jan Willem van Borselen, Nicholas Roosenboom, his daughter Margaretha and her husband Johannes Gijsbert Vogel, Willem Troost, the American Hudson River School Painter Louis Rémy Mignot and his son-in-law Wijnand Nuyen.

He also occasionally painted with his friend Hendrik van de Sande Bakhuyzen, a prominent Romantic landscape painter, including at least one joint canvas that bears both of their signatures.

[2] At the end of his career Schelfhout put together a series of eighty landscape drawings, mainly recordings of previous paintings and watercolours.