Ilse Bischoff (1901–1990) was an American artist, book illustrator, and author. Best known for her skill in woodblock printing, she also painted in oils and casein and made graphite drawings. She remained firmly committed to representational art throughout her life, choosing human figures for her main subjects during most of career and turning toward still lifes toward the end. She illustrated many books, including two of which she was author. Family wealth allowed her to pursue the multiple facets of her career free of worries about critical reception or the income that her work would bring her. She nonetheless welcomed both the praise that was given to her art and writings and the tangible rewards they earned her.
She received art training in New York City and Munich, traveled extensively in Europe for most of her life, and maintained studios at her homes in New York and Vermont. At the beginning of her career she won the top prize in the first annual exhibition of American block prints held by the Philadelphia Print Club, a book she wrote mid-career won a reviewer's unqualified praise, and, late in her career, the director of an art center praised her "forthright choice of natural subjects" and said her work conveyed "the beauty, wit and charm of factual reality".
Early life and education
Bischoff was born on November 21, 1901, in New York City. As a child she loved to draw and, as she grew older, her mother encouraged this interest. From kindergarten through twelfth grade she attended the Horace Mann School, a liberal co-educational component of Columbia Teachers College located on the campus of the university. The art director at Horace Mann, Belle Boas, helped Bischoff develop her interest in art into a creative skill. Boas and fellow teacher, Lucia Williams Dement, taught using an innovative method that aimed, as they wrote, "toward individuality of expression". They had pupils work from nature rather than copying famous artists and, when viewing famous works of art, saw the development of their pupils' "critical judgment" as a main goal. They summarized their approach in a 1917 publication describing Horace Mann's curriculum, writing, "The work must grow upward from the child's point of view rather than downward from the adult's, thereby keeping the fearless, naïve, childlike interest and expression toward which the conventional adult mind usually looks back as upon a lost Eden". Although the family's wealth ensured that Bischoff would not need to earn a living, her mother encouraged her to attend a school where she could learn a useful trade. After graduating from Horace Mann in 1919, she consequently enrolled in the New York School of Applied Design for Women where she received good applied-arts training in how to make meticulously accurate drawings of flowers. In 1920, she enrolled in the Parsons School of Design (then known as the New York School of Fine and Applied Art) where she primarily studied costume design. Then, having realized that she would prefer to work in the fine arts, she enrolled in the Art Students League where she learned illustration and painting from Frank DuMond and etching and lithography from Joseph Pennell.
Bischoff's parents were both German-American and the family spoke German in their home when she was young. She later said English was effectively her second language as a child. Her fluency in German gave her an advantage when, beginning in 1922, she began to make regular trips to Germany and other European countries to study art. Apart from the years of World War II, she visited Europe almost every year. Her longest period of foreign travel came in about 1927-1928 when she interrupted her training at the Art Students League to study privately in Munich under the German portraitist and printmaker, Georg Buchner (1858–1914). After returning from Munich, Bischoff completed her education at the Art Students League.