Partial View [of] Oberlin, Alonzo Pease, circa 1838 PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE OBERLIN COLLEGE ARCHIVES
			A Short Biography of the Artist Alonzo Pease (1820-1881)
	Archivist and College Friends Rescue Portraits Relating to Early Oberlin History		When he was 12 years old, Alonzo Pease accompanied his uncle Peter to Ohio, where Peter Pindar Pease and his family built the first structure in Oberlin. Growing up in the New West, where there were no schools of art, Alonzo was entirely self-taught. His earliest known work is a small watercolor on paper of the town of Oberlin, painted in 1838 when he was 18. The watercolor appeared at the top of a letter to Sylvester Stoddard in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Titled Partial View [of] Oberlin, the letter and drawing were somehow separated. The Oberlin College Archives acquired the drawing in 1994 as a gift from David Dreyer '62, who purchased it from David Good, Antiques, in Camden, Ohio. The location of the letter is unknown. (See Marcia Goldberg, "Alonzo Pease's Oberlin," Timeline [July/August, 1997]: 20-23.) Pease moved to Cleveland in 1856, where he spent the next three years working as a photograph colorizer for various studios. He returned to Oberlin in 1859 to paint portraits of people connected to the College and First Congregational Church. After a short move to Detroit, and an even shorter stint in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry, he moved to New York in 1865; he stayed there until his return to Oberlin in 1880. He died the next year.
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