Pancoast belongs to the second generation of American Impressionist landscape painters — the cohort formally trained at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Académie Julian in the years before the First World War, and who took the small New England fishing town as their working subject across the first half of the twentieth century.
Pancoast came to art through one of the most disciplined American training paths of the late nineteenth century. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he enrolled in 1897, was at that point the leading academic teaching institution in the United States, and his work under Thomas Anshutz — a senior figure of the Academy and one of the most influential teachers of the period — gave him a thorough grounding in observational drawing and tonal painting. Anshutz became a mentor and lifelong friend, and the relationship would shape both Pancoast's professional choices and his subsequent residence.
The three years he spent at the Académie Julian in Paris extended that training within the most active European studio system of the period. The Académie Julian was the principal alternative to the École des Beaux-Arts for international students, and his work there with Jean-Paul Laurens — a major academic history painter — completed the formal European foundation that distinguished American Impressionists of his generation from their self-taught contemporaries.
His professional life on his return to the United States combined studio painting with newspaper work. The decade and a half spent in Philadelphia newspaper art departments gave him a sustained discipline of working under deadline and producing finished images quickly, and the cartoon and illustration practice developed alongside his easel painting. The decision to leave newspaper work and pursue painting full time arrived around 1919, and the move to New York in the early 1920s placed him within the broader American gallery system.
His mature painting concentrated on the New England coast. The Cape Ann fishing villages of Gloucester and Rockport — well known to American Impressionists since the late nineteenth century, and gathering points for the Hawthorne, Hibbard, and broader Rockport Art Association painters — became his summer working ground, and his wife's Studio Gallery by the Sea gave him a permanent presence in the local exhibition circuit. The paintings handle a particular American Impressionist territory: the wharves, lobster pots, painted houses, snow-covered streets, and harbors of the working New England shore, rendered in a tonal Impressionism with occasional bursts of Expressionist brush and color.
His position today is that of a respected representative of the second generation of American Impressionism — an artist whose long working life produced a substantial body of New England coastal painting and whose work has continued to circulate steadily through galleries and the secondary market in the decades since his death.