Walter Elmer Schofield ROI RBA was an American Impressionist landscape and marine painter. Although he never lived in New Hope or Bucks County, Schofield is regarded as one of the Pennsylvania Impressionists.
His body of work includes autumnal landscapes and snow scenes of Pennsylvania and New England, and summery landscapes and marine paintings of England and France. Late in his career, he painted vividly-colored landscapes of the American Southwest.
Schofield's works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Woodmere Art Museum, and other American museums. In Europe, his works are in the collections of the Godolphin Estate in England, and the Musée d'Orsay in France. Two paintings are in the Juan Manuel Blanes Museum in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The world auction record for a Schofield work was set on December 1, 2004, when Rapids in Winter sold for US$456,000 at Sotheby's NY.