If you examine Francis Alison's portrait in the University Visitors Center in just the right light, you might spot a faint outline around the head.

Artist Frank E. Schoonover first painted the University founder wearing a white powdered wig.

UD trustees asked Schoonover for a redo a few years later. What they had in mind was more of a Colonial bob.

Schoonover, in his 60s then, was a nationally known illustrator who had shared a studio building with N.C. Wyeth and painted the covers for classic editions of Treasure Island, Gulliver's Travels and Swiss Family Robinson. Still, he cheerfully got out his brushes and gave the Rev. Alison a new do.

"He loved the University of Delaware," his granddaughter Louise Schoonover Smith, AS '63, says. She is compiling her grandfather's catalogue raisonné with her brother, John Schoonover; her husband, George Smith, EG '64; Michael NeVille, AS '90, a private practice art conservator; and researcher Lee Ann Dean, AS '75, former Schoonover archivist at the Delaware Art Museum.

They have a tool most artists don't leave for their archivists. Schoonover's small daybooks list just about every work he produced in his seven-decade career. Each entry is numbered, and Schoonover painted the corresponding number on the back of each canvas in black paint. "He was, for an artist, so incredibly organized," Dean says.

With the daybooks as roadmaps, they've found collectors who got their Schoonovers directly from the artist--as wedding presents, in exchange for a new roof on his studio, even in payment for insurance bills.

One collector has 34 paintings hanging in his home near Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Schoonover painted portraits, landscapes and murals and even worked with some stained glass from 1898 until the mid-1960s. His vivid illustrations pop off the covers of the first editions of Hans Brinker and Kidnapped. One of his easel paintings recently sold at auction for $280,000.

He got his first commission through his teacher, Brandywine School founder Howard Pyle. Pyle's wife, Annie, cross-stitched Schoonover's initials on his artist's apron, which still hangs on a closet door in his old studio, a turn-of-the-century Queen Anne-style building at 1616 North Rodney St. in Wilmington, Del.

The Schoonover Fund has documented 2,000 of the artist's 2,507 works, including nine on UD's campus.

They also discovered a basket of stories about the congenial artist whose studio turned into a neighborhood salon on Wednesday evenings.

Schoonover once excised a deer-chasing hunter from a landscape because the prospective owner was skittish. A little dark paint later, the deer were out of danger. The hunter had been transformed into some large rocks.

When books and magazines forsook paintings for photographs in the '40s and '50s, Schoonover spent more time teaching adults and children. Louise Smith remembers her grandfather would paint a little on the children's canvases and joke with them. When they hiked to the Brandywine to paint landscapes, he'd try to convince them there were gnomes hiding behind the rocks.

Schoonover, always immaculate in his shirt and tie and smock, would sometimes take his penknife and cut a face out of one of his canvases and hand it to a young student to show him how it's done.

"He had this wonderful way of making you feel he was interested in you," Louise Smith says. "He'd say, 'Come over here. Come over here. Look at this, I want to show you this.' Then he'd tell them a story. Once, he convinced a child there was a bird out West that laid square eggs."

One of Schoonover's adult students told his grandson he came upon the artist one day shoving several canvases into a fire in a steel barrel outside his studio. When the neighbor asked Schoonover why he was burning his paintings, the artist matter-of-factly said, "They've already been paid for." While some artists didn't care what happened to their originals once they were paid for the illustrations, Schoonover always asked the publishers to ship them back to Wilmington.

He kept track of each work in his daybooks--the first 2,068 entries are in a set of small books in the Schoonover Archive at Delaware Art Museum. Sometimes, he'd jot down the models' names or how much they were paid. When Schoonover went out to paint landscapes, he recorded the number and types of fish he caught that day.

Later, he began making entries on large loose-leaf ledger pages, but many of them couldn't be found.

"We just could not find the last daybooks," Louise Smith says. "We could only find up to a certain point. We went to the Brandywine River Museum. We went to the Delaware Art Museum. Then, one day, an old friend of my grandfather came by with a paper sack with a handle on it with so many paper sheets inside. He said, 'These are for you and your research. I think they will be of interest.'"

Walking into Schoonover's studio is like walking into one of his paintings. A miniature stagecoach rests in one corner. The distinctive knee-high books from "Hopalong Takes Command" rest on a shelf 98 years after they took center stage in the painting. An old toboggan hangs high on one wall.

The fund has identified 500 Schoonover owners. Some concentrated in specific subjects. St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Del., has Ivanhoes. The Joan of Arc paintings are at Tower Hill School in Wilmington, Del. Wilmington Savings Fund Society has the Lincolns.

For Louise and George Smith, researching her grandfather's catalog is a quest full of surprises. They often travel between Delaware and their New Jersey home talking to newfound owners. They also drive to the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover, Del. where Schoonover for Students, an arts education program, is housed.

UD is a central part of the Schoonover Fund. Four of the principals were educated here. There's another UD connection, too. Four decades and four children ago, Louise and George Smith met on the Newark campus.

He was a graduate student in chemical engineering, and she was his roommate's blind date. She was the Student Government Association president at the time, and Delaware's U.S. Sen. Joseph R. Biden, AS '65, was a member of her SGA Senate.

She had just finished working with a Philadelphia Mummers' costumer to design a Blue Hen mascot uniform with a heavy papier-mâché mask.

Smith remembers making a comment to his future wife about the mascot: "I said, 'Are you the one responsible for that big fat turkey parading around on the basketball court?'"

--Kathy Canavan