Stephen Alonzo Schoff

[1] Stephen Alonzo Schoff was born in Danville, Vermont, January 16, 1818, and grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

After his return to the United States he was soon employed upon his first important work, "Caius Marius on the Ruins of Carthage," after John Vanderlyn.

Among his other noteworthy portraits are Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emanuel Swedenborg and a self-portrait after a W.H.W.

Sylvester Rosa Koehler, curator of the print departments at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian Institution, published a number of books and portfolios which included etchings by Schoff.

Schoff lived in a number of locations, including New York, Washington D.C., Connecticut, and Vermont, but for most of his life he resided in Newton, Massachusetts, where he was a long-standing member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church.