Edward Hopper Encyclopedia

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Edward Hopper Encyclopedia

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Edward Hopper Encyclopedia LENORA MAMUNES

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY

OF

CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Mamunes, Lenora, 1942– Edward Hopper encyclopedia / Lenora Mamunes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-4356-7 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Hopper, Edward, 1882–1967 — Dictionaries. I. Hopper, Edward, 1882–1967. II. Title. N6537.H6M36 2011 759.13 — dc22 [B] 2011009007 BRITISH LIBRARY

CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

© 2011 Lenora Mamunes. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image: Edward Hopper (1882–1967), The Lee Shore, 1941. Private collection (Art Resource, New York) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To George, my husband, mentor, editor and best friend

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TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii Preface 1 How to Use This Encyclopedia 3

The Encyclopedia 5 Appendix A. Life Chronolog y 147 Appendix B. Solo and Retrospective Exhibitions, 1920 –2010 155 Appendix C. Chronolog y of Cited Artworks 158 Bibliography 173 Index 181

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For their assistance, guidance and generosity, I am grateful to the following: Kristen N. Leipert, Assistant Archivist, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Carole Perry, Executive Director, Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, New York. Ann Heath Karlstrom, Director of Publications, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Sara C. Arnold, Curator of Collections, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina. Paula Wisotski, Associate Professor, Fine Arts Department, Loyola University, Chicago. Stephanie Buck, Librarian/Archivist, Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Joshua Findlay, Peter Findlay Gallery, New York City. Margaret Zoller, Reference Assistant, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C. Tracy L. Adler, Curator, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York City. Sara Levy, Librarian, Rockland Community College, State University of New York. Martha Severens, Curator, Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina. Brian Jennings, Local History Librarian, Nyack Public Library, Nyack, New York. Gary Prunotto, Yard Manager, Julius Petersen, Inc., Marine Facilities, Nyack, New York. Alexis Gordon, Gallery Associate, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, California. Special thanks to Michelle Fanelli, Reference Librarian, the Henry Birnbaum Library, Pace University, New York.

viii

PREFACE Art has always been at the center of my life, even in the absence of a full career in art. I studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan, became an exhibited pen-and-ink artist, earned a degree in art, and served as curator for a number of art exhibitions. In 1996 I was invited by HarperCollins Exhibition Space in Manhattan to put together “Voices from the Heart,” an exhibition of artists’ books and works on paper by members of the Women’s Caucus for Art. In 1998 I became a volunteer at the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York, the birthplace and childhood home of Edward Hopper. I redesigned the organization’s newsletter, helped organize art exhibitions, and took my turn in attending to the needs of Hopper House visitors. I am now in my second go-round as a member of the board of trustees of the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation. Visitors to the Hopper House brim over with questions about Hopper and his art. As one of the volunteer docents, I often ﬁnd myself scrambling to come up with answers. What we need, I have come to see, is a one-volume reference guide to Edward Hopper’s life and art. Thus, this encyclopedia. My goal is to serve the needs, not only of those visiting the Hopper House, but also of art teachers and students, museum and gallery devotees, and all others drawn to the art of Edward Hopper.

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HOW

TO

USE THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA

Artwork Entries. There are 350 entries. Of these, 246 entries deal with Hopper art works: 152 oils, 75 watercolors, 19 etchings/drypoints. Each such entry is headed by a title, date of completion, medium, dimensions, and location in the year 2010. An example:

Gas 1940. Oil on canvas. 261 ⁄ 4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (66.7 ¥ 102.2 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York

More about titles. After the deaths of Edward and Josephine Hopper, the Whitney Museum of American Art received a bequest of over 3,000 pieces of Hopper art, many untitled. Titles were assigned at the Whitney by Lloyd Goodrich and research assistant Elizabeth Tweedy Streibert, or by Gail Levin in Edward Hopper: A Catalog Raisonné. I add an asterisk to works titled in this manner. An example: Paris Street*. More about dates of completion. Many of Hopper’s works, and especially those included in the Hopper bequest, are undated. When you come across a range of dates (ex. 1905–06) you should know that Gail Levin, in Edward Hopper: A Catalog Raisonné, assigned that date on the basis of style, theme and locale. More about the art medium. I use the simple designation “watercolor on paper,” even though most watercolors start off with a pencil sketch. Etching is more complex and can involve many techniques. I designate Hopper’s graphic art as either an “etching” or a “drypoint.” More about dimensions. The height is given ﬁrst, and then the width. For etchings and drypoints, the size of the plate is given, not the overall size of the print. More about location in the year 2010. Prints made from each of Hopper’s etchings and drypoints are distributed among a number of museums; the museum I list is merely a reference point. Before traveling a distance to see a Hopper artwork, check to see if it is available. Museums rotate their collections, and occasionally sell a work of art. Non-artwork entries. More than 100 entries deal variously with people important in Hopper’s personal life or career; places where Hopper painted; institutions that supported his work; and art terms that continually pop up in discussions of his work. Cross-referencing. A useful feature of this encyclopedia. To explore the contents of an entry more fully, follow the boldfaced words. 3

How to Use This Encyclopedia

4

Going deeper. At the bottom of each of the 350 entries, I cite the source(s) for its data. Full citations can be found in the bibliography. Face to face with Hopper. You probably will want to raise an Internet image of a Hopper artwork as you read about it in an entry. I fervently hope this will lead you on to a deeper attachment to the man and his art. Internet images are a poor substitute for Hopper’s original works; modern reprographic techniques tend to warm up colors and sharpen lines. Lacking the three-dimensional texture of paint on canvas, all photographs of Hopper’s paintings become ﬂat and slick. The only way to really know Hopper is to see and study his art, close up, in a museum.

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA abstract art

Kansas — Guy Pène du Bois, Hopper’s friend and fellow artist, described this painting as a “simple village cottage, solidly rendered. Here again, the characteristic architectural quietude and dignity of his subjects, devoid of intrusive human personalities, is well in evidence.” Hopper painted Adam’s House during his ﬁnal summer in Gloucester. He added details not often found in his watercolors: an ornamental ledge with carved brackets over the door, a yellow ﬁre hydrant, blue-green shutters at every window, electric wires strung to a utility pole. Sitting high above the town, the house is ablaze in sunlight. It is Hopper’s treatment of light that gives Adam’s House its special appeal. His “many studies of Gloucester buildings,” writes art critic Carl Little, “illustrate a key architectural principle: light has the power to give an inert, man-made construction the living quality of nature. In Hopper’s hands, the elements — dormers and gables, awnings and windows — become receptacles of light and shadow that change in character, even in form, as the sun moves up or down the sky.” The Wichita Art Museum website offers these details, followed by its analysis: “To render Adam’s House, Hopper, in his usual manner, ﬁrst lightly sketched in the street scene in pencil onto toothed watercolor paper. Over this brief sketch he then applied loose washes before proceeding to develop areas of greater detail. Finer detail like shutter slats and telephone wires were dryly brushed in with deft strokes at the last. Forms appear in high relief

Edward Hopper took a dim view of the wave of abstraction sweeping through the American art world in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1950 he shared this thought with drama critic Emory Lewis: “Abstract art? It will turn back to life again. When you deny representation, you limit yourself. Just another of those endless cycles.” In 1952 Hopper joined a group of artists to protest the wholesale replacement of representational art by abstract art, especially at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The group published the short-lived Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions, in which Hopper placed a statement describing modern art as little more than “stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design,” and no substitute for the inner life of the human being, which he called “a vast and varied realm.” And yet, Hopper’s art sometimes verged on the abstract, most notably his Sun in an Empty Room (1963), where, London art critic Roger Kimball contends, “the emotional burden is carried almost entirely by intersecting planes of light. How effective, how moving ... but also how evacuated, how bare.” Sources: (1) Emory Lewis, “Painter Edward Hopper Has Show at Whitney Museum” (2) Roger Kimball, “Splendid Isolation.”

Adam’s House 1928. Watercolor on paper, 16 ¥ 25 in. (40.6 ¥ 63.5 cm), Wichita Art Museum, Wichita,

5

Adobe beneath the summer sun with long shadows stretching from behind ﬁre hydrant, utility pole, and neighboring houses. The utility pole and wires stand in marked contrast to the New England clapboard and picket fence, hinting at an underlying tension between traditional and modern values.” Sources: (1) Guy Pène du Bois, “The American Paintings of Edward Hopper” (2) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Adobe Houses 1925. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection—Seeking a locale other than New England in which to paint, the Hoppers went by train to New Mexico in the summer of 1925. What they found there was different, indeed. The “houses in Santa Fe,” writes artist and author Gerry Souter, “appeared more like forts than the delicatelydetailed and ornately-decorated houses of seaside Maine and Massachusetts.” There were no windows and gables and eaves and chimneys to paint; in Adobe Houses, Hopper renders the houses as geometric blocks of tan. What might have been a monochromatic painting is relieved by the purple in a distant mountain ridge and by a swath of green in the middle ground. Adobe Houses was included in a 2009 exhibition, “Modernists in New Mexico,” at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. Alan Braddock, the museum’s associate curator, focused on Hopper’s attention to the structural patterns and visual effects of southwestern scenery: “In the right foreground, for example, a row of vigas— or round wooden ceiling beams — extends beyond the rooﬂine of an adobe building, creating an interesting play of shadows below while echoing the rhythmic array of hills in the background. Brief notations in Hopper’s hand refer to these elements as ‘hot looking, ends of adobe poles, speckled hills, hills in background,’ conﬁrming his interest in their spatial relationship. Elsewhere in the picture, areas of light and shade produce a jigsaw pattern of geometric shapes that lend further dynamism to the otherwise quiet and motionless scene.”

6 Sources: (1) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (2) Alan Braddock, “Modernists in New Mexico.”

American Landscape 1920. Etching on copper. Platemark: 71 ⁄ 2 ¥ 12 ⁄ 2 in. (19.1 ¥ 31.8 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts—Edward Hopper loved to ride the trains, and he often depicted tracks, railroad cars and train stations. He may have been struck by the way trains rushed through the countryside to arrive at the city. He once commented: “You know, when you go by on a train, everything looks beautiful. But if you stop, it becomes drab.” In this etching, he depicts cows laboring up a hill to cross railroad tracks that impede their walk home. The tracks, to art historian Robert Hobbs, are a symbol of technology encroaching on rural America; he calls the print “an interrupted landscape.” Statistics support this view: it was in 1920 that, for the ﬁrst time, the number of Americans living in cities and surrounding areas equaled those in farm areas. 1

Source: Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper.

American Scene Painting In 1930 the artist Guy Pène du Bois, Hopper’s friend, attached the term “American Scene” to Hopper’s art. Art historian Matthew Baigell describes the American Scene movement as an attempt “to develop a democratic art easily accessible to the ordinary person, capable of moving him nostalgically, politically, and esthetically, by means of commonly recognizable images presented in easily understood styles.” Hopper painted American scenes, of course, even in Charleston, South Carolina, but refused to be lumped in with Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and other regionalists of the 1920s and 1930s. In an interview with Brian O’Doherty, Hopper was dismissive of the movement: “The thing that makes me so mad is the American Scene business. I never tried to do the American Scene as Benton and Curry and the Mid-western painters did. I think the

7 American Scene painters caricature America. I always wanted to do myself. The French painters didn’t talk about the ‘French Scene,’ or the English painters about the ‘English Scene.’ It always gets a rise out of me. The American quality is in a painter — he doesn’t have to strive for it.” Sources: (1) Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

American Village 1912. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—Canadian poet and humanities professor Bruce Ross describes American Village as “a birds eye view of an intersection in a village. Under the inﬂuence of impressionism, Hopper has uncharacteristically softened the edges of his ﬁgures and structures. The color, however, is kept drab as if representing a mistcovered village. Despite the familiar yellow bus stopping for passengers there is again a lonely, detached feel to the painting, particularly from the perspective it has taken. Although the scene is overly familiar, nothing in it is drawn with a sense of concrete deﬁniteness.” The painting’s lack of deﬁnition stems from brushwork as well as from perspective. Hopper applies dabs of paint, an impressionist technique he also uses in Gloucester Harbor and Squam Light, two other paintings from the summer of 1912. His French apprenticeship wound down with Queensborough Bridge, Soir Bleu and Yonkers (1916). He came to realize that there was no market for his impressionistic paintings. It was at this time that Hopper took up etching; it was in this medium that his mature style emerged. Source: Bruce Ross, Venturing upon Dizzy Heights.

Anderson’s House 1926. Watercolor on paper, 1315 ⁄16 ¥ 1915 ⁄16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.7 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts — This painting is an ex-

Anshutz ample of Hopper’s ability to turn a modest 1870s clapboard residence fronting a busy street into a digniﬁed structure, standing tall in the sunlight. This three-story house located on Western Avenue in Gloucester, Massachusetts, “is still yellow,” The Boston Globe reported in 2007, “[but] the paint is peeling in spots, a bumper sticker can be seen on the second ﬂoor window, and some of the shutters are missing.” Curator Carol Troyen senses that Hopper’s approach in Anderson’s House “was not intended to dazzle, but rather to add weight and conviction to his subject.” Hopper did not use special paper, nor did he work in the spontaneous manner usually associated with watercolor. “To achieve a gritty effect that suggests the saltpocked clapboards of the house,” Troyen explains, “Hopper brushed in color, wiped it away, and then applied additional layers of translucent pigment. He laid down the sky in careful striations that echo the horizontals of the clapboards. His shadows create diagonal patterns across the facade of the building, animating its mute solidity and suggesting the relentless sun.” Sources: (1) Geoff Edgers, “Preserved in Paint: Hopper’s Works Capture a Gloucester That Some Fear Is Fading” (2) Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Gloucester.”

Anshutz, Thomas Pollock (1851– 1912) Anshutz was the art instructor of those who later became Hopper’s instructors. After studying under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Anshutz stayed on as a teacher. He became a catalyst for early American modernism, emphasizing the necessity for experimentation and the questioning of accepted conventions. Among his students were Robert Henri and John Sloan. Robert Henri, Hopper’s principal instructor, called Anshutz his “greatest inﬂuence.” Like Anshutz and Eakins, Henri encouraged students to capture the raw vitality of everyday life. In his diary, Henri recalled a formula for

Apartment painting that Anshutz had urged upon his students, a formula that Hopper adopted: “When you go home draw the model from your mind. When at leisure notice a man — his position. Draw him. He will move, but go on and ﬁnish from memory ... you will gain great results from it.” Source: Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art.

Apartment Houses 1923. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 2815 ⁄ 16 in. (61 ¥ 73.5 cm), Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — Edward Hopper was bemused at his ability to paint what he referred to as “windows seen thru windows.” After attending the 2007 “Edward Hopper Retrospective” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, art writer Bill Van Sicklen commented on Apartment Houses, and its windows, calling it “Hopperesque”: “Hopper sets himself the challenge of placing a ﬁgure— in this case it’s a plump blond maid—in a corner apartment with front and rear windows. The result is a visual roller-coaster ride, in which we zoom in one window, voyeuristically bounce around the apartment for a while, then exit through the rear window.” When it purchased Apartment Houses in 1925, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts became the ﬁrst museum to acquire an oil painting by Hopper. Source: Bill Van Sicklen, “Hopper in the Hub.”

Apartment Houses, Harlem River* 1930. Oil on canvas, 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper’s preoccupation with architecture, and especially with windows, is striking. Here, he presents an eerie tableau: eight apartment buildings, all in drab gray, line up along the Bronx side of the Harlem River in New York City. The only hint of human life is the muted electric lighting in several windows. Dubbing Apartment Houses, Harlem River “the starkest city windows of all,” writer John Updike quipped

8 that Hopper was “resolute in his pursuit of mundane appearances.” Source: John Updike, Still Looking: Essays on Art.

Approaching a City 1946. Oil on canvas, 271 ⁄8 ¥ 36 in. (68.9 ¥ 91.4 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.— Hopper found this New York City scene at Ninety-seventh Street at Park Avenue, where a rail line passes from the viaduct over Harlem into a tunnel under Carnegie Hill. Hopper knew the painting would spark an emotional response. “I’ve always been interested in approaching a big city by train,” he told John Morse in a 1959 interview, “and I can’t exactly describe the sensations. But they’re entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with esthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety, and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into the city.” The painting suggests “the rushing movement of a train,” writes Luce scholar Richard L. Rubenfeld. “By widening the view in the ﬁnished painting, Hopper provoked the sensation of the train’s deceleration as it reached the outskirts of a city. He also provided the viewer with more time to explore the bleak setting and prepare for what is beyond the tunnel.... The unseen traveler is in a curious limbo between city and country ... Hopper, by asserting the anonymity of the place and not revealing the train’s destination, suggests a future that is both predictable and unknown.” Sources: (1) Interview between Edward Hopper and John Morse (2) Richard L. Rubenfeld, “The American Scene: Realism and Social Concern.”

Après-midi de Juin 1907. Oil on canvas, 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄2 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper remembered his ﬁrst impressions of Paris, France: “I liked the physical aspect of the city. I worked by myself in the streets, along the river, painting under the inﬂuence of impressionism, painting everything in a high key for nearly a year.” Aprèsmidi de Juin, with its palette of pale yellows, blues and lavenders, its soft lighting, and its

9 quick Monet-like brushstrokes is a prime example of his early Parisian paintings. Hopper was intrigued by the play of light in Paris. “The light was different from anything I had ever known,” he told Suzanne Burrey in 1956: “The shadows were luminous—more reﬂected light. Even under the bridges there was a certain luminosity.” Shortly after returning to America in 1908, Hopper painted The El Station; in its colors, brushstrokes, and pale luminosity, it repeated the techniques he adopted in Paris. This phase in Hopper’s art was short lived. His later Paris paintings show intense color and more detail. His work in Paris, he later told a reporter from Time magazine, “was probably not a strong, lasting inﬂuence, after all. Other than to lighten tones for me. [Robert] Henri’s students painted very dark.” Sources: (1) Suzanne Burrey, “Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces” (2) “Art: The Silent Witness,” Time.

Arthur

Armory Show Hopper was 30 years old when he sold his ﬁrst painting, at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory in 1913. European modernists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Wassily Kandinsky, along with a number of American artists, had been invited to exhibit. Several of Robert Henri’s former students were on the selection committee, and they urged Hopper to submit art even though he had not been invited. Of the two paintings he offered, the committee accepted Sailing. The oil was purchased by Manhattan textile manufacturer Thomas F. Vietor for $250. (Hopper did not sell another painting until 1923, when the Brooklyn Museum acquired The Mansard Roof, a watercolor, for $100.) Source: Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show.

Arthur (Jo’s cat) architecture In his 1928 essay on Charles Burchﬁeld, Hopper expressed this belief: “Our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo–Gothic, French-Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eyesearing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets ... these appear again and again, as they should in any honest delineation of the American scene.” Believing the American identity was embedded in such architecture, Hopper refused to paint scenes of skyscrapers and city skylines. “Hopper was drawn to architecture,” writes art historian Avis Berman, because of its “natural compatibility with the solidity and bulk of his own compositions. His sense of design was so formidable that the works seems not so much painted as built. Indeed, when one of his canvases was in process, Hopper referred to it as being ‘under construction.’” Sources: (1) Edward Hopper, “Charles Burchﬁeld: American” (2) Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York.

In 1923 Josephine Nivison took her tomcat Arthur with her to Gloucester, Massachusetts. Hopper, who was also summering there, knew Jo from their days as students at the New York School of Art. They soon began to paint together, fell in love, and married the follow ing year. In an interview, Jo told Brian O’Doherty that Hopper “married a woman with a cat, not just a woman. I was taking out a maternity complex on a big warrior alley cat — the scourge of 9th Street. It was all right by the cat. He lapped it all up. Nothing he wanted more than an adoring mother.” Hopper, jealous of the cat, vented his feelings in caricature. O’Doherty describes one, The Great God Arthur: “Mrs. Hopper sits tête-à-tête with a man-sized cat, while Hopper, shrunk and cringing on the ﬂoor, begs from the cat, who looks at him with a malevolent condescension.” In 1925, while the Hoppers were planning their summer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Arthur went missing. In a 1960 exhibition, “The Cat in Art” at the Condon Riley Gallery, Jo showed several paintings of cats. Hopper reluctantly attended the reception, staying on

Artist’s the sidelines. Soon after, he created another caricature, Mrs. Kit Hopper’s One-Man Jury Show, depicting a mouse in the gallery hall sitting in front of the cat paintings. Sources: (1) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art (2) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack* 1905–06. Oil on board, 151 ⁄16 ¥ 111 ⁄ 16 in. (38.3 ¥ 28.1 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper shows a cropped view of his bedroom at his family home in Nyack, New York. At the left is a partial view of a closed door, at the right a bureau with a lamp and, above, a gold-framed portrait that closely resembles a Hopper self-portrait done a year or so earlier. In the foreground is the bottom portion of Hopper’s wooden bed. The dark palette reﬂects Hopper’s training at the time under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. At some point in 1905 or 1906, Hopper painted a second oil, this one on canvas, titled The Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack*, and a third and fourth with the titles Man Seated on Bed* and Bedroom*. Each of the four oils shows the scene from a different vantage point. Man Seated on Bed* depicts a bare-chested man in trousers, sitting across from the closed bedroom door. He sits at the spot where Hopper would have been stationed for the ﬁrst two Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack* paintings. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Ashcan School Ashcan School artists Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan and George Bellows recorded the gritty underside of urban life: immigrants, prostitutes, street urchins, peddlers, boxers. These artists commingled with The Eight, a group organized and led by Henri. As social realists, the painters in the Ashcan School revealed the inequality and unfairness of city life. Art historians Zurier, Snyder, and Mecklenburg note that the members of the Ashcan School “are best understood as

10 New York artists. The dynamics of urban change were essential to the force and complexity of their art, which was largely a response to the challenge of representing a tumultuous era in the city’s history.... Their individual voices reveal six related but distinct approaches to a problem faced by all New Yorkers, that of trying to understand life in a changing metropolis.” Hopper had little compassion for the city’s poor and marginalized residents. Instead, he wanted to capture the inner feelings of those caught up in city life, and the architecture surrounding them. He once told art critic Katharine Kuh: “Though I studied with Robert Henri I was never a member of the Ashcan School. You see, it had a sociological trend which didn’t interest me.” Sources: (1) Bennard B. Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight (2) Rebecca W. Zurier; Robert W. Snyder; Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (3) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists.

Ash’s House 1929. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York — Hopper shows a Charleston, South Carolina, house with a second-story veranda, located at 154 Tradd Street. The modest house was the home of Hambrick and Julia Ashe, African American laborers. “It lay nestled,” writes Gibbes Museum of Art curator Angela Mack, “in the shadows of the antebellum Greek Revival style Chrisholm-Alston mansion at 172 Tradd Street.” Hopper painted Ash’s House from his second-story veranda at the boarding house directly across Tradd Street. The Gibbes Museum staged an exhibit, “Edward Hopper in Charleston,” in 2006; in the catalog Mack observes that Ash’s House catches “an intensity and clarity of light not found in New York City or on the New England coast.... Sharp contrasts and pure saturated colors evoke the warmth and humidity of the area’s subtropical climate.” Mack compares Hopper’s “ability to express climate so

11 effectively in his Charleston watercolors” with Winslow Homer’s memorable paintings of Cuba and the Bahamas. This comparison holds up when we examine Hopper’s House with Veranda, Charleston, S.C.*; Fort and Gun*; Automobile Near a Cabin*; The Battery, Charleston, S.C.*, and especially Folly Beach, a Hopper watercolor directly in the tradition of Homer. Source: Angela D. Mack, Edward Hopper in Charleston.

August in the City 1945. Oil on canvas, 23 ¥ 30 in. (58.4 ¥ 76.2 cm), Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida — This painting depicts a swank Upper West Side building that Hopper spotted while roaming Manhattan in search of new subjects. We peek through a set of bay windows curtained in gold drapes, and see a bronze statue of a woman, a white-globed table lamp, an elaborate marble mantel and glimpses of furniture. There are no human ﬁgures; the trees across the street in Central Park are the only “life” in view. The “august” in the painting’s title does not suggest the time of year, but the social prominence of the apartment owners and of the neighborhood. Because August in the City was ﬁnished four days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, and was apparently reworked in those last few days, it may be something of a political statement. It is well documented by Gail Levin that the Hoppers detested Roosevelt and the New Deal of the 1930s, and that in 1940 the Hoppers voted for the Republican candidate, Wendell Wilkie. Now Roosevelt was dead and the nation was experiencing its greatest outpouring of grief since the assassination of Lincoln. Does August in the City reﬂect, in part, Hopper’s sardonic response to all of this? Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Automat 1927. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 36 in. (71.4 ¥ 91.4 cm), Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa — Automats were self-service restaurants

Automobile featuring giant, nickel-operated vending machines behind walls of glass and chrome doors. The places were clean and sanitary, and the nickel coffee almost legendary. New York City’s ﬁrst Horn and Hardart Automat opened in 1912; its stained glass windows were conceived by the same artist who designed the windows for the city’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Jo and Edward Hopper knew all this, of course; as cost-conscious newlyweds in the 1920s, they were frequent visitors to the Automat in lower Manhattan. There were crowds and a hum of activity. This is not the case in Automat, however — Hopper spotlights a single late-night diner. Scholar Gordon Theisen describes the scene: “A young woman sits with downcast eyes at a round table ... with barely enough enthusiasm for life to lift the cup of coffee she holds in her right hand near a small empty plate that may have held a roll or sandwich. Behind her a darkened plate-glass window reﬂects nothing of the Automat’s interior except for a line of lights along the ceiling. We see no crowds, only her, alone, in the center of this vast city. Why bother to remove her hat and coat? She has not.” Source: Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche.

automobile America fell in love with the automobile in the 1920s, and Hopper joined the trend in 1927 when he purchased a used 1925 Dodge. The Hoppers motored out of New York City into the countryside, often using the car to go long distances in search of painting subjects. Cars show up in a number of Hopper paintings: Prospect Street, Gloucester; Cars and Rocks, Box Factory, Gloucester, Circus Wagon, Automobile Near a Cabin*, Barn at Essex. In Western Motel, Hopper depicts the front of an automobile as seen through the motel’s picture window. His friend Lloyd Goodrich understood the importance of automobiles to Hopper: “This preoccupation with the concept of travel is quite conscious; he has said that his themes often come to him when driving,

Balcony and that in certain works, such as Approaching a City, he was expressing the emotions one has on entering a strange town.” Source: Lloyd Goodrich, “Edward Hopper.”

The Balcony, or The Movies 1928. Drypoint on zinc. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This drypoint attests to Hopper’s passion for motion pictures and, especially, for movie theaters. He employs cinematic effects: an unusual high-angle view, a steep diagonal of stairs and a sharp contrast of light and dark. We see two women seated in the balcony, and a glimpse of a man in the tier below, perhaps taking his seat. When his setting is a movie house or live theater, Hopper rarely shows more than two or three patrons and almost never shows the screen or stage. His focus differs from that of social realists such as John Sloan and George Bellows, a fact noted by Philip French, ﬁlm critic for The Observer: “Hopper’s mentor, Robert Henri, a creator of the realist ‘Ashcan School,’ encouraged him to go out to theatres and movie houses in order to observe the community at play. Instead, Hopper recorded the isolation of individual spectators waiting for the curtain to go up or the lights to go down. Glued to the screen or the proscenium arch, they turn in on themselves in a succession of unforgettable works. Hopper’s etching entitled The Balcony or The Movies came early on, depicting two isolated ﬁgures looking down at an unseen screen.” The Balcony and another drypoint that year, a portrait of Jo Hopper, were Hopper’s ﬁnal two etchings. After 1928 he devoted himself solely to painting. Source: Philip French, “From Nighthawks to the Shadows of Film Noir.”

Baptistry of St. John’s 1929. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina — Hopper spent three weeks in Charleston, South Car-

12 olina, in April of 1929, completing eleven watercolors. Here, he captures the silent dignity of the interior of a well-known Lutheran church on Archdale Street, ﬁve blocks from Tradd Street, where the Hoppers were staying. Hopper ﬁrst made a detailed conté crayon drawing of the cloth covering the cross of the baptistry font, then went on to ﬁnish the watercolor in off hours, when the church was empty. He featured the white marble rail and font, the altar stairs at the right and the gray-and-white tiled ﬂoor. What at ﬁrst glance appears to be a simple composition has a surprising number of details for a Hopper painting. He shows the horizontal white railing with decorative black wrought iron, balanced by verticals: brown shutters, white columns, and baptismal font. Curator Martha Severens notes that this is the only church interior ever painted by Hopper, and that with its “sharp contrast of lights and darks and melancholy mood ... it resembles his well-known street scenes, Victorian houses, and movie house lobbies.” Baptistry of St. John’s was included in “Edward Hopper in Charleston,” a 2006 exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston. The exhibition catalog notes the “pervasive mood of solitude” in Baptistry of St. John’s, and related it to “many of Edward’s other interiors.... But, in this image the play of exterior light is not a factor. The shuttered window separates the scene from the outside world and imparts a strong sense of stillness.” Sources: (1) Martha R. Severens, “Southern Scene” (2) Angela D. Mack, Edward Hopper in Charleston.

Barber Shop 1931. Oil on canvas, 60 ¥ 78 in. (152.4 ¥ 198.1 cm), Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, New York — This is the largest of all Hopper paintings. Sunlight streams into the barber shop and sets a backdrop for the manicurist, who sits apart from the others, reading a magazine while awaiting a customer. She is the central ﬁgure in Jo Hopper’s ledger book entry, and this is appropriate, for we see

13 only the back of the barber and a mere glimpse of his customer. “Hopper is attracted to women reading,” writes art historian James Conlon, “and he has at least twelve oil paintings on this theme ... the reading woman is usually situated in a modern setting where the only natural element is the complex yellow sunlight pouring into the artiﬁcial space. Despite the ordinariness of the setting however, there is usually some detail that undermines the everyday quality of the scene and forces the viewer to construct a narrative into which the painting’s moment can be meaningfully placed.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper (2) James Conlon, “Men Reading Women Reading: Interpreting Images of Women Readers.”

Barr, Alfred Hamilton, Jr. (1902–81) One of Hopper’s champions, Alfred Barr was a founding director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. He studied art history, ﬁrst at Princeton and later at Harvard. Through his energetic promotion of exhibitions at MoMA, Barr took the lead in bringing ordinary Americans to an awareness and appreciation of modern art. Barr arranged Hopper’s ﬁrst retrospective at MoMA in 1933, describing Hopper as “the most exciting painter in America.” He viewed Hopper’s work as “part of a new international progressive trend emerging within modernism, represented by a balance between ‘form’ and ‘content.’” Although Barr called Hopper a “master of pictorial drama,” he also concluded that Hopper’s “actors are rarely human: the houses and thoroughfares of humanity are there, but they are peopled more often by ﬁre hydrants, lamp posts, barber poles and telegraph poles than by human beings.” Hopper was grateful to be featured at MoMA, and for the retrospective catalog he provided his personal philosophy of art, “Notes on Painting.” The essay included this statement: “My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.”

Bill Source: Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. (ed.), Edward Hopper, Retrospective Exhibition, November 1– December 7, 1933.

Bellows, George Wesley (1882–1925) In the early 1900s Bellows was Hopper’s classmate and friend at the New York School of Art. Their instructor, Robert Henri, admired Hopper’s work but spoke of Bellows as his “star pupil.” Bellows went on to become a successful and highly acclaimed artist at a time (1906–22) when Hopper sold only one painting. While known for his famous boxing pictures, Bellows was an exceptional landscape painter who counted winter scenes among his favorite subjects (he was especially skilled at rendering the crisp blue luster and the frozen texture of drifted snow). Bellows tried to help Hopper gain entry into art shows, and in direct support he purchased Hopper’s House in Italian Quarter (1923) and Haskell’s House (1924) at a 1924 Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery exhibition. On January 8, 1925, only a few weeks after that purchase, Bellows’s appendix burst, and he died soon after. Both Henri and Hopper were among those at the funeral service. “This is the most overwhelming grief that has ever come to me,” Henri said. “I have lost my pupil, my friend, my son.” Hopper, too, was devastated. A short time later he began a watercolor, a bleak wintry scene he titled Day After the Funeral. Source: Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art.

Bill Latham’s House 1927. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection—The Hoppers ran their newly purchased car up to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, for the summer. In this painting, Hopper depicts the home of William W. Latham, a former schooner captain and later a dedicated surfman at the Coast Guard station at nearby Two Lights. Latham had been retired only a few months when Hopper arrived in Maine. The color yellow predominates in Hopper’s portrait of the house: a deep yellow grass in the foreground is reﬂected not only in the

Bistro water in the distance but also in a clear wide sky. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes that Hopper “adjusted the vantage point to create a dynamic link between viewer and subject. The softness of the dry grass and the spiky tree limbs bridge the space between the house and the observer, even as the fence assures Latham’s privacy and reminds us of the psychological distance between his life and ours.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, “Edward Hopper’s Houses.”

Le Bistro, or The Wine Shop 1909. Oil on canvas, 233 ⁄ 8 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (54.4 ¥ 72.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper painted this scene after returning from his second trip to Paris, France. At the left, the canvas shows a couple seated outside a café. An off-white bridge and four slender trees take up the rest of the canvas. The two ﬁgures are literally “cornered” in shadow, while the bridge and trees are rendered in soft pastels and bathed in light. Germain Viatte, who helped coordinate a 1989 exhibit of Hopper’s art at the Musée Cantini in Marseilles, provides this analysis of Le Bistro: “Hopper abandons the post-impressionist brushwork that he adopted during his ﬁrst trip [to Paris], when Patrick Henry Bruce introduced him to the work of Sisley, Renoir, and Pissarro, in favor of a more uniﬁed, Luminist method.... He ﬂuently contrasts the various parts of the canvas in order to create among them a poetic and symbolic tension. On the one hand, there are the Parisian buildings (characterized by their somber verticality), the contrasting tiers of the storefront and upper facade, and the merchant’s sign; they seem to yield to the morning breeze and are highlighted by the spiral motif of the two seated customers. On the other hand, there is the deliberately airy space. With its emptiness swept by pale shadows, its water ﬂowing under the gentle arches of a bridge, and the golden bending of its four poplars, it is like a tender metaphor for the feminist universe.” Source: Germain Viatte, “Commentary on the Works.”

14

Blackhead, Monhegan* 1916–19. Oil on wood, 91 ⁄ 2 ¥ 13 in. (24.1 ¥ 33 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Between 1916 and 1919 Hopper painted thirty-two variations of Monhegan Island’s extraordinary Maine coastline, including this one, where he used a thick application (impasto) of reds, oranges and yellows to depict the rugged terrain, achieving a contrast against the bright blue sea and sky. He left this oil and two others of the same scene unsigned and untitled; never sold, they became part of the Hopper bequest to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Scholar Rolf Günter Renner sees this painting as “impressionist-inﬂuenced,” but suggests also that Hopper “introduced a new expressive dynamism into his approach” and that his “choice of perspective reinforces this impression of dynamism: our gaze is drawn in at an angle from above, focused on a coastline, with the crashing waves in the bay only partly visible. The image that results is one of natural forces at odds with each other.” Source: Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882 –1967: Transformation of the Real.

Blackwell’s Island 1911. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Blackwell’s Island, extending for two miles in the East River of New York City, was known for a time as Welfare Island and is now called Roosevelt Island. Edward Hopper’s meanderings around Manhattan in search of painting subjects led him to the bridge overlooking the island. Blackwell’s Island was part of the Hopper bequest received by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. New York Times art critic James Mellow found the painting to be one of the “most striking” works in the Whitney’s 1972 Hopper bequest exhibition: “a subtly constructed picture. Everything in it is carefully thought through — the black silhouette of a tug just slipping out from under the bridge, the nearly liquid strokes of the white

15 paint that mark the reﬂection of the moon, the barely perceptible shift in value in the dry blue that makes up the two halves of the water cut by the moon’s reﬂection.” Hopper painted another version of Blackwell’s Island in 1928, a detailed close-up of the island at a time when, as a prison, it housed some of America’s worst mobsters. All the comforts of home were smuggled in — the inmates lived like kings amid the surrounding squalid conditions. The penitentiary was closed and the prisoners moved to Rikers Island in 1936. Curator Carol Troyen references the Blackwell’s Island prison when she describes the 1928 version as “a painting of deep emotional resonance” and “sinister stillness.” Sources: (1) James Mellow, “Hopper: More Than a Great American Realist” (2) Carol Troyen, “ ‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City.”

Blanchard, Elizabeth Cameron (Bee) (1873–1956) Bee Blanchard, a New York City interior decorator and art collector, was one of Hopper’s major patrons, beginning with her purchase of three paintings —Italian Quarter (1923), Portuguese Quarter (1923), and House and Harbor (1924)—from Hopper’s 1924 show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. The next year, soon after Hopper returned from Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his new watercolors, she arranged with Rehn to purchase Adobe Houses, D. & R. G. Locomotive and La Penitente, all in 1925. In 1926 Blanchard entertained a visiting reporter from the New York Sun. She walked him through her collection of paintings purchased from her earnings as a home decorator, explaining that “good pictures are sound investments, only I think, perhaps, I’d starve before I’d sell one. I’ve been offered ten times what I gave for my Sargent.” The reporter included that comment in his story, adding: “She has had ﬂattering offers for others. George Bellows, wishing to possess two of her six Hoppers, commented: ‘I don’t know who Mrs. Blanchard is, but she’s some picker.’ She is very

Bootleggers pleased that, quite on her own initiative, she should have recognized the worth of Hopper, who ‘gloriﬁes commonplace things,’ before he became famous.” Source: “Decorator Developed Professional Career From Hobby,” New York Sun.

Blynman Bridge* 1923 or 1924. Watercolor on paper, 1315 ⁄16 ¥ 19 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper shows the Blynman Bridge, one of the busiest drawbridges on the East Coast of the United States. The bridge spans the Blynman canal at the mouth of the Annisquam River, connecting downtown Gloucester, Massachusetts, with outlying areas to the west and south. The drawbridge was named for the Reverend Blynman, an early religious leader. At the left Hopper shows the bridge span, the water and canal below and a small house (still standing today), all rendered in varying shades of blue. The bridge-tender house at the span’s eastern end is shown in rust and brown, a contrast to the wash of greenish yellow that suggests a grassy hillside. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes that Hopper “positioned himself just far enough back to focus on the building housing the bridge mechanism. The vertical chimney and utility pole reinforce its centrality in the scene.” These linear mechanical shapes, Mecklenburg notes, “provide a foil to the organic form of the sloping hillside.” This is Hopper’s only New England bridge scene to include ﬁgures. Small and barely visible, two women walk across the bridge, and at the bridge railing a woman stands looking out into Gloucester Harbor. Next to the bridge house, the bridge tender stands alert, his ofﬁcial status accented by an American ﬂag nearby. 15

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

The Bootleggers 1925. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 38 in. (76.2 ¥ 96.5 cm), Currier Museum of Art, Manchester,

Bow New Hampshire—According to art critic Carl Little, this painting “grew out of the rash of bootlegging incidents that took place around Gloucester [Massachusetts] in the 1920s.... The coast ... of Cape Ann with its myriad coves, rivers, inlets, marshes, secret places, wharves ... came alive between sundown and sunup during Prohibition, and all this activity was spiced with bursts of melodrama, Coast Guard chases, gun battles, rammings, burnings, mysterious explosions, scuttlings, highjackings and piracy.” The Brooklyn Museum exhibited The Bootleggers immediately after its completion. The painting was shown again at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1927, then returned to the artist’s studio until it was purchased in 1956 by the Currier Museum of Art. The Currier Museum website provides this description: “The Bootleggers is an unusually dramatic painting for Hopper. It is sometime after dark, and in the foreground a motorboat churns along the bank of a river or tidal inlet. Occupying the boat are three men; backs to the viewer, they turn their heads in unison toward a large Victorian house rising above the shore. There a lone ﬁgure returns the men’s gaze, establishing contact ... muted colors and simpliﬁed forms contribute further to the compelling ﬁlm noir effect of Hopper’s image. Restricting his palette mainly to blues and greys, the artist suggests not only the time of day but the cheerless mood surrounding the criminal transaction.” Source: Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon 1926. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama—Hopper had painted trawlers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1923 and 1924, and on his stay in Rockland, Maine he was again drawn to the subject. In its composition, Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon stands apart from Hopper’s 12 other completed trawler paintings and shows his innate ability to turn an ordinary subject into something more riveting. In a close-up view of a foredeck, he

16 focuses on the massive winch required to retrieve the trawling net with its catch of ﬁsh. “By focusing on the motorized winch,” curator Virginia Mecklenburg observes, “Hopper alluded obliquely to the drastic changes that had overtaken the lives of the trawler ﬁshermen.” The ﬁshing industry in Maine, which in the 1800s provided twenty percent of the nation’s total catch of ﬁsh, had experienced a decline in the early 1900s. Many blamed the beam trawlers for having overﬁshed the waters. Mecklenburg explains that “the trawlers worked somewhat like dredges,” bringing up not only ﬁsh but also what the ﬁsh fed on. By the mid– 1920s trawlers had replaced sailing schooners almost entirely, pushing aside the tradition of hook-and-line ﬁshing and contributing signiﬁcantly to the disintegration of the ﬂeet of smaller boats. In 1938 Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon was chosen to appear in Scribner’s Magazine as part of its American Painters series. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Bridge in Paris* 1906. Oil on wood, 95 ⁄ 8 ¥ 13 in. (24.4 ¥ 33 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper completed this solemn painting during the rainy early months of his ﬁrst stay in France. It offers a view of, but not into, a dark railway tunnel that takes up the center of the canvas. Dark tunnels are something of a Hopper motif, and can also be found in Bridle Path (1939) and Approaching a City (1946). Hopper had not yet abandoned Robert Henri’s dark palette at the New York School of Art. The only contrast to the browns and greys in Bridge in Paris is a bright red signal light atop a pole at the tunnel’s entrance. When the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter came upon Bridge in Paris in 1993, he saw in it “a good deal of the later classic Hopper,” asserting that the painting “sums up in a stroke his gift for evocatively combining the abstract with the particular.” Paris in 1906 was central to Hopper’s growth as an artist, Cotter asserts, “a magical, ﬂeeting moment in which

17 the expressive options open to him were many, exciting and clear.” Source: Holland Cotter, “Hopper’s Views of the City of Light.”

Bridle Path 1939. Oil on canvas, 283 ⁄8 ¥ 421 ⁄8 in. (72.1 ¥ 107.7 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California — Writing in London in 1981, art critic Richard Cork called Bridle Path as an “odd painting ... [that] shows horses starting with terror as their riders urge them towards the black mouth of a tunnel. Menacing, sharp-edged rocks frame this cavernous opening and Hopper uses the horses to dramatise his own fears about the prospect of unrelieved darkness.” Hopper leaves it to the viewer to invent a narrative for the scene. “None of his pictures provides an easy explanation,” writes Cork. “As with any mystery, we long to know more about these intriguing slices of life. But Hopper, for many years forced against his will to subsidize his art by working in commercial illustration, never wanted his paintings to tell a story. He saw his work as a form of meditation on the riddle of existence.” Source: Richard Cork, “Light on the Darker Sides of Life”

Bruce, Patrick Henry (1881–1936) Soon after arriving in Paris, France, in 1906 for the ﬁrst of three visits, Hopper sought out his friend and former classmate at the New York School of Art, Patrick Henry Bruce. Both had studied under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and had grown to like one another. Bruce had been introduced to famed art collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein and regularly attended their Saturday salons. Bruce exposed Hopper to French impressionism and urged Hopper to attend the salons and avantgarde art classes. Hopper refused; he later told Brian O’Doherty that he preferred to “go to the cafés at night and sit and watch.” In 1920, French writer and modernist art collector Henri-Pierre Roche wrote: “Bruce

Bull works hard ... without any recognition, without wanting (almost) recognition—his work is very strong, simple, evident, powerful, constructed.... He is a living protest, more than anybody, against the cheap vices of almost all painting of today.” Roche’s description of Bruce could easily apply to Hopper who, by 1920, had all but abandoned painting in favor of etching. Sources: (1) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art (2) William C. Agee and Barbara Rose, Patrick Henry Bruce, American Modernist: A Catalog Raisonné.

The Bull Fight 1917. Etching on copper. Platemark: 47 ⁄ 8 ¥ 7 in. (12.4 ¥ 17.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — When The Bull Fight was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in 1963, a local art critic wrote that “the artist has caught the terror and plight of the individuals involved — the mad rush of the bull — the hopeless extremity of the picador and the agony of the blindfolded horse. The action expressed here equals any bull ﬁght etching ever made.” Hopper created the etching seven years after his only visit to Madrid. At that time he had posted a letter to Marion Hopper, his sister, describing a bull ﬁght’s early stages, when horses are ridden up to the bull to be gored and left bloody and dying. He characterized the event, not as a sport, but as butchery. Hopper’s etching The Bull Fight is remarkably accurate in its detail. Ernest Hemingway (one of Hopper’s favorite authors) wrote the deﬁnitive treatise on bullﬁghts, Death in the Afternoon (1932). Hemingway’s picador and Hopper’s picador are one and the same: “[he] has his right leg and foot armored under chamois-skin breeches, wears short jacket and shirt and tie like any other bullﬁghter, and a wide low-crowned hat with a pompom on the side.” The slaughter of the horses was not a problem for Hemingway. He clariﬁed the roles of the horse and of the picador: “The role of the horse has become that of providing something the bull will charge so that his neck muscles will be tired ... [the picador] places his pic

Burchﬁeld in such a manner as to force the bull to tire those muscles. His duty is to tire the bull rather than weaken him by wounds.” Hemingway wrote approvingly of the use of old horses at bullﬁghts: “I would rather see a dozen old horses killed on purpose than one good horse killed by accident.” Sources: (1) Emily Manchester, “Museum Exhibits Edward Hopper,” Worcester (Massachusetts) Daily Telegram (2) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (3) Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon.

Burchﬁeld, Charles Ephraim (1893–1967) In 1929 Charles Burchﬁeld signed on with the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, where he met Hopper. Burchﬁeld was one of America’s most original artists, known for his romantic, often fantastic canvases. “Burchﬁeld’s work falls into roughly three periods,” writes John Dorfman, senior editor of Art & Antiques Magazine. “In the ﬁrst, from 1915 to 1920, nature was his exclusive subject, and he rendered the landscape around his hometown of Salem, Ohio, in a heightened, visionary style that is basically representational but includes abstract and symbolic elements, including a strange system of what the artist termed ‘conventions for abstract thought’— glyphs of his own invention meant to represent certain emotional states that he worked into otherwise realistic scenes. In his middle period, during the 1920s and ’30s through the early years of World War II, Burchﬁeld turned away from this inner world of communion with nature to engage the social and political realities of his time, painting realistic small-town and industrial scenes in an almost documentary vein. His work in this period is generally grouped with the American Scene [Painting] of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Finally, in 1943 he returned to the visionary, fantastic mode of his youth, but with new techniques and grander ambitions.” Burchﬁeld and Hopper each respected and admired the other’s work. “Integrity is the word that instantly comes to my mind when contem-

18 plating the man and his art,” Burchﬁeld once wrote of Hopper, adding that, like the work of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, Hopper’s art was destined to become a classic. Art historians have compared Burchﬁeld and Hopper. Theodore Stebbins asserts that Burchﬁeld “was as energetic and experimental in his watercolors as Hopper was cold and precise in his ... Burchﬁeld seeks to express in his brushwork nature’s own pulsating vitality.” Milton Brown feels the same way, noting that Burchﬁeld’s “romantic ingredient gives his paintings an animation which Hopper’s entirely lack. Burchﬁeld’s houses are personalities, his automobiles animals; there is a spiritual communication between animate and inanimate objects.” Burchﬁeld died in January 1967, and Hopper died four months later, prompting the Buffalo Evening News to celebrate the accomplishments of both men: “Although sometimes described as regionalists, both Hopper (the Easterner) and Burchﬁeld (the Midwesterner) went far beyond the narrow conﬁnes of that word to paint the American scene with a special perception of its character. Their achievement in painting the American city and countryside, with honesty and expressive beauty, secured for both men a lasting place as the outstanding romantic realists of the 20th Century in America.” Sources: (1) John Dorfman, “The Visionary” (2) Theodore Stebbins, American Master Drawings and Watercolors (3) Milton Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (4) Jean Reeves, “Death of Edward Hopper Ends Art Era in the U.S.”

Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro* 1930–33. Oil on canvas, 243 ⁄4 ¥ 36 in. (62.9 ¥ 91.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Beginning in 1930 Hopper repeatedly painted the house and outbuildings on the Cape Cod farmland owned by his landlord, Burleigh Cobb (“Burly,” in Jo Hopper’s spelling). Four of the works were conventional landscapes: Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses* and Cobb’s Barns, South Truro* (both 1930–33)

19 in oil; Burly Cobb Hen Coop and Barn (1930) and Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses* (1931), in watercolor. Hopper experimented with three other works. An oil, Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro and two watercolors, Burly Cobb’s House (1930) and Roofs of the Cobb Barn (1931) call attention to the geometric forms of the buildings’ roofs. “Hopper’s Truro paintings,” writes Gregory Dicum, “outline an important crossroads in his work: isolated buildings in broad vistas are meditations on form and color that steer toward the abstract while remaining ﬁgurative.” Source: Gregory Dicum, “Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light.”

California Hills 1957. Watercolor on paper, 211 ⁄2 ¥ 291 ⁄ 4 in. (54.6 ¥ 74.3 cm), Hallmark Fine Art Collection, Kansas City, Missouri—Hopper painted this scene on his ﬁnal trip to the American West, when he was invited to Paciﬁc Palisades, California, by the Huntington Hartford Foundation. The Hoppers lived at the foundation in one of the studio-residences designed by Lloyd Wright, son of the Frank Lloyd Wright (Hopper shows one of these residences at the lower left of California Hills). When California Hills took top prize (one of the jurors was Lloyd Goodrich, Hopper’s friend and champion) in the Fourth International Hallmark Art Competition in 1958, Stuart Preston of the New York Times was enthusiastic: “Hopper’s painting ... depicting the rising sun lighting up a green hillside ... is the latest, and not the least eloquent, in his long series of romantic evocations of the American scene.” The art editor for The Kansas City Star was more expansive, calling the painting “realistic but poetic ... [it] could as easily have been called simply ‘Hills,’ for obviously the geographical location is not important.... There is a warmth in the hills of living greens and blues, the trees and a stream bathed in sunlight which communicates beauty, poignancy, nostalgia.” Sources: (1) Stuart Preston, “Art: Hallmark Award, Edward Hopper Takes $2,000 First Prize”

Canaday (2) Jan Dickerson, “Americans Take Top Honors in Competition Sponsored by Firm Here.”

The Camel’s Hump 1931. Oil on Canvas, 321 ⁄ 4 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (81.9 ¥ 127.6 cm), Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York — This landscape is one of Hopper’s most sensuous paintings. The sunlight on the hills alternating with deep shadows indicates a late afternoon scene. We see (and feel) the rolling hills, the “hump,” and the soft curvilinear patterns everywhere. In 1932, when The Camel’s Hump was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, it was described by one art critic as a “superb landscape ... a direct, realistic statement of the New England countryside, as meticulous as any landscape painted by the painstaking craftsmen of the Hudson River School, and like theirs, suggesting something cosmic and beyond the turmoil of every day’s existence.” The Camel’s Hump was shown at the Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and the Arts Club of Chicago in 1934. In a letter to the Chicago curator, Jo Hopper described the painting: “the loveliest thing he’s ever done — for sheer beauty — the sea is just back of the hills — not seen but it explains much — the clarity, the kind of sky. When shown at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery and later at The Whitney Museum, there were people who almost wept over it.” Sources: (1) “Whitney Museum Places Water Color and Print Collection on View,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (2) Josephine Nivison Hopper, unpublished letter in the Francis Mulhall Achilles Library.

Canaday, John (1907–85) John Canaday and Edward Hopper were at the center of an art world controversy that erupted in the 1960s. Canaday had become the chief art critic at the New York Times in 1959. In his very ﬁrst column he criticized the New York City art community for what he felt was its over-the-top promotion of abstract art. “We have been had,” he wrote, by the “freaks, the charlatans, and the misled who

Cape surround this handful of serious and talented artists.” He continued a running commentary on this theme, and in 1961 a group of collectors, art history professors and artists (including Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, and Robert Motherwell) wrote a letter to the New York Times denouncing Canaday’s views and labeling him an agitator. This letter prompted 600 responses from the art community, the majority of which bitterly attacked Canaday’s judgment and even his sanity. Fifty-two of these letters were published in the Times; one was from Hopper, who came to Canaday’s defense: “There have been, I believe, other efforts to silence John Canaday’s voice, but heretofore they have failed. There are, I have heard, strong forces of money and inﬂuence against him, as there would naturally be, but I believe John Canaday is the best and most outspoken art critic the Times has ever had.” After attending Hopper’s 1964 Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective, Canaday described Hopper, then 82 years old, as “a rangy, big-boned man whose appearance suggests that he might have been a member of his college crew around the year 1900. Nothing suggests the wiry compactness of the long-distance runner but a long-distance runner is what Edward Hopper has always been. His steady pace does not decrease from year to year, although he is so far ahead of the ﬁeld that you would think he might slow down a little ... his special power is that he sees the world with an extraordinary combination of objectivity and interpretive response.... It is ... [his] apparent refusal to pry beneath surfaces that gives Hopper’s cityscapes the quality of poetry disguised as objectivity, the crux of his art.” Canaday and Hopper had a long talk at that 1964 retrospective; Canaday later remembered that Hopper “surprised me, delighted me and embarrassed me by insisting that I sit down beside him for a conversation.... Looking back, I feel sure that Hopper singled me out for attention that afternoon less because of what I had written about him than for my having gone on record a few years earlier with some

20 reservations about abstract expressionism when that movement was at its height.” By 1964, the uproar over the Canaday attack on abstract expressionism had diminished, and Canaday was able to write in a Times column that Hopper “has remained in the good graces of even the abstract painters, because, alone among American realists, he works in a way easily connectable with abstraction in the careful disposition, the inventive purity of his surface patterns.” Source: John Canaday, Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art.

Cape Cod Afternoon 1936. Oil on canvas, 343 ⁄ 16 ¥ 501 ⁄ 16 in. (87 ¥ 127 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — Hopper’s composition features three horizontals: at the top, a light blue sky with wispy clouds; in the middle ground a tree and buildings; in the foreground a grassy area brilliantly lit by late afternoon sun. A detailed description was offered by the Carnegie Museum of Art’s assistant director, John O’Connor, Jr., in 1938: “The painting shows the rear of a nondescript white frame cottage facing the water, with stable and ramshackle sheds in the foreground. The place has not been inhabited during the summer season. The incident was not an inspiring one, but the artist with his power of selection, sympathy, and his technical skill has elevated it to an important American scene.” Cape Cod Afternoon was slated for inclusion in an exhibition of oils, watercolor and etching at the Carnegie Museum in March 1937, but was diverted into the Fifteenth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it won the W.A. Clark First Prize of $2,000 and the Corcoran Gold Medal. Source: John O’Connor, Jr., “Patrons in Deed.”

Cape Cod Bay 1965. Watercolor on paper, 221 ⁄ 8 ¥ 297 ⁄ 8 in. (56.2 ¥ 75.9 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—Hopper’s sister, Marion Hopper, died on July 16, 1965; Edward and

21 Jo Hopper, spent several weeks in Nyack, New York, settling Marion’s affairs. It wasn’t until August that the couple ﬁnally arrived at Cape Cod. There, at age 83, Hopper painted his very last watercolor, Cape Cod Bay. Curator Ellen Roberts points out that, even though Hopper’s South Truro house overlooked Cape Cod Bay, “he avoided painting aspects of the landscape that had traditionally attracted artists—the Cape’s stunning beaches and ocean views. In fact, he rarely produced a pure landscape, without any man-made elements. Cape Cod Bay is one of those rare exceptions, a picturesque scene rendered in blues, greens and yellows. Hopper shows grassy dunes in the foreground, and beyond, the calm waters of the bay; overhead, swirling clouds in a light blue sky repeat the soft curves of the dune foliage. Off in the distance, we see two slivers of architecture rising above the horizon. The taller structure is undoubtedly Provincetown’s greatest tourist attraction, the Pilgrim Monument located on High Pole Hill, 350 feet above sea level. Built in 1910 to commemorate the Mayﬂower pilgrims’ brief 1620 stay in Provincetown, the tower is the tallest all-granite structure in the United States. Most likely the smaller structure is St. Peter the Apostle, a Catholic church located on a Prov incetown hill a bit farther to the west. St. Peter’s burned to the ground in 2005, and has since been rebuilt. Source: Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro.”

Cape Cod Evening 1939. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.—At ﬁrst glance, one might think this a comfortable country scene: a man and woman outside their home, looking at a collie dog in the tall grass. But there are signs of a tense relationship; the woman’s arms folded to her chest and the man ignoring her, seemingly more attentive to the dog. The dog is not interested in either of them, and instead looks off to the left of the canvas. The mood is melancholy: the couple and uninviting house are about to be swallowed up by the invading woods.

Cape Hopper never publicly acknowledged the emotional tension in Cape Cod Evening, but many critics sense its presence. “Hopper chose to paint not a straightforwardly understandable interaction between the ﬁgures,” writes curator Ellen Roberts, “but a more complex moment in which the two are lost in their own thoughts, not communicating. His equivocal human ﬁgures engaged in uncertain relationships mark his paintings as modern.” Source: Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro.”

Cape Cod Morning 1950. Oil on canvas, 341 ⁄4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (87 ¥ 101.9 cm), National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.— Art critic Kathy Field writes that “Hopper chose to paint people unposed and unrehearsed ... [and] in the company of their own thoughts,” and this is true in Cape Cod Morning, where Hopper shows a woman gazing out a bay window at an undetermined view. “Her gaze,” writes Field, “is the only action in the picture. Since no object of her stare is shown, the painting causes the viewer to wonder why this woman has come to the window to look out so intently.” Jo Hopper’s simple explanation was that the woman was checking the weather before hanging out her wash. But the woman is not dressed to be doing laundry; her hair is done up and she’s in a low-cut pink dress. In any event, there is no need to arrive at a narrative. Hopper was concerned with mood, not story. Field is taken by “the stillness and intensity” of Cape Cod Morning: “Time seems suspended. Every molecule is in place. It is in this atmosphere, evoked so cleverly and deliberately, that Hopper suggests something of the moral earnestness of being alone, faced with oneself and the prospect of self-knowledge.” Source: Kathy Field, “Looking Out, Looking In.”

Cape Cod Sunset 1934. Oil on canvas, 287 ⁄8 ¥ 347 ⁄ 8 in. (73.3 ¥ 91.1 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — The demands on Hopper’s

Captain time in 1933 were enormous; he needed to complete the design and building of his South Truro, Cape Cod, home and studio and to supervise preparations for his 1933 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He had started Cape Cod Sunset, but was forced to place it aside. He was never able to capture his momentum; the ﬁnished painting, showing a large white house and dense mass of trees, was not up to his standards. It is awkward, both in its perspective and in composition. Hopper’s morning (1950), afternoon (1936) and evening (1939) Cape Cod scenes were purchased by prestigious museums. Hopper delivered Cape Cod Sunset to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in January of 1934 where it sat, unsold. It was eventually returned to the Hoppers, and became one of the artworks bequeathed by the couple to the Whitney Museum of American Art. When the Whitney exhibited works from the bequest in 1971, poet Mark Strand commented in the New York Times that Cape Cod Sunset “appears to have much in common with other, better known Hoppers,” but that “it lacks their solidity, their monumental reticence and, in fact, displays an uncharacteristic frailty.” Source: Mark Strand, “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World.”

Captain Kelly’s House 1931. Watercolor on paper, 20 ¥ 247 ⁄ 8 in. (50.8 ¥ 63.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper painted this scene at the start of his second summer on Cape Cod. He shows a house with startling cerulean blue shutters, standing behind railroad tracks. Behind and to the side of the house, banks of trees sprawl out into the surrounding hills. A sandy road fronts the house, but there is no path leading visibly to the door. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg explains that “the house had been built in the nineteenth century by a sea captain. [It was] originally an isolated spot, [but] the coming of the railroad had intruded into the private space of the family’s home. While many buildings in

22 the area had been moved to new locations when their sites became undesirable, Captain Kelly’s house still stood on its original site in the early 1930s, but was closed and up for sale.” Mecklenburg sensed that Hopper’s “theme of past and present, old giving way to new, persisted.” The following year, when the house was still closed and up for sale, Hopper returned to repeat the scene, but this time in oil and almost twice the size. He eventually titled this second painting Dauphinée House, after the new owners, Henry and Constance Dauphinée. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head 1927. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut—Hopper painted a picturesque Portland Head lighthouse keeper’s home fronting a cropped view of the lighthouse tower. The house seems personable: open, warm, welcoming. The porch archways look like eyebrows, the windows beneath like eyes. The Wadsworth Atheneum website provides this commentary: “Rather than exploit the watercolor medium for its ﬂashing or bravura effects, he used its transparency to accentuate space. The dense, opaque red of the shed at the lower right forms a sharp contrast to the delicate, subtly shaded washes of the blue sky, balancing the composition and giving it illusionistic depth.” Curator Virginia Mecklenburg recounts the history of this house in Maine: “Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head shows a dwelling that had sheltered two generations of a family. The Strouts had kept Portland Head Light since 1869, when Joshua Strout, a sea captain who had risen through the ranks, was appointed keeper after being injured in a fall from the masthead of his ship.... On Strout’s retirement in 1904, his son Joseph was appointed keeper and still served there when the Hoppers came in 1927.... The two were leg-

23 endary ﬁgures in the folklore of the area, and by naming the watercolor for the family, Hopper made certain that viewers familiar with their story would understand that the picture depicted not merely an interesting building, but a place of heroes.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Captain Upton’s House 1927. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 361 ⁄4 in. (71.8 ¥ 92.1 cm), Collection of Steve Martin — The setting for this painting is Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The lighthouse keeper’s home was built in 1878. When Hopper visited in 1927, the Coast Guard station’s keeper was Joseph H. Upton. In Captain Upton’s House, Hopper shows the keeper’s house and the lighthouse looming behind it; he uses whites, taupes and grays, and conveyed the idea of the light beacon by painting the panes of glass in the lantern in shades of gold. The complex is seen from below, bathed in sunlight. “Solidly volumetric against a bright blue sky,” writes art critic Roberta Smith, “this structure is very much in command, as is Hopper’s glistening, robust brushwork.” At the Bellagio Gallery in 2001 the actor Steve Martin exhibited 25 artworks from his private collection, among them Captain Upton’s House. Martin told the Las Vegas Sun that it’s possible to “sense the interior of the house, feel the wicker chairs on the porch that are just beyond view, that there is really someone living inside.” Martin may be projecting his feelings into the painting. Although the sun is shining, the mood of this painting is subdued, perhaps because Hopper’s customary theatrical lighting is missing. There is no means of entry, since the only two doors visible are without doorknobs. There are no porticos or balconies, and the windows are all darkened. Hopper painted at least a half dozen scenes of the Coast Guard station at Two Lights. In doing so, he surely became acquainted with Joseph Upton. It’s not likely that Hopper learned of Upton’s tragic death in 1934, at the

Cars age of 65. One night Upton went to switch on the auxiliary light because the main light had failed. His wife went out to check on him; at the bottom of the spiral staircase she discovered Upton, unconscious; he had fallen down the staircase and fractured his skull. Brought to the hospital, he died a brief time later. Sources: (1) Roberta Smith, “Review/Art; The Real World and Edward Hopper” (2) Kimberley McGee, “Eye for Art: Steve Martin’s Prized Painting Collection Gets a Critical Look” (3) Roxie J. Zwicker, Haunted Portland: From Pirates to Ghost Brides.

caricature From the start, Hopper thought it great fun to lampoon himself and others in drawings. In 1900 he created a pen and ink caricature, Edward Hopper Boxing with Wallace Tremper. It shows Hopper as a teenager with big feet, long legs, and an exaggeratedly skinny body, in boxing shorts and gloves, decidedly overmatched, a smile of resignation on his face. In the winter of 1906, waiting out weeks of rain in Paris, France, he produced 33 watercolor caricatures, including Parisian Workman*, Sargent de Ville, La Concierge, La Grisette, Parisian Woman Dressed in Green*, Cunard Sailor*, Seated Carriage Driver*, Couple Drinking*, and Dandy Seated at Café Table*. Hopper’s marriage to Josephine Nivison brought with it an excess of emotions and two of his best caricatures. In The Great God Arthur (“Status Quo”), Jo is at the dinner table; Arthur, Jo’s pampered cat, sits opposite. Hopper, skin and bones, grovels beneath Arthur, an empty food dish on the ﬂoor in front of him. In another drawing, Meal Time, Hopper depicts himself as a skeleton, on his knees in front of Jo, begging to be fed ( Jo hardly ever cooked — the two ate out almost every night). Jo, seated in a chair perched on a cloud, reads a book, oblivious to Hopper’s pleading. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Cars and Rocks* 1927. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in.

Cat (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This scene of two cars perched above rocky cliffs marks the ﬁrst appearance of an automobile in one of Hopper’s paintings. In 1927 Hopper became the proud owner of his ﬁrst car, a used 1925 Dodge, in which he had motored up to Maine for the summer. Art historians think the setting for this painting was Portland Head lighthouse, where sightseers park and then walk about to admire the view. The automobile pictured in Cars and Rocks appears to be a 1927 LaSalle touring car, General Motors’ top of the line. “Hopper drew attention to the stylishness of the LaSalle by placing it in the center of the painting,” notes art historian Janet Comey, “by using the swirling clouds to frame its beautiful lines.” Comey believes that Hopper’s aim was “to portray the automobile as a handsome machine and as a means for Americans — himself included — to tour the country.” The inscription at the lower left of Cars and Rocks reads: “Edward Hopper for J.H.” It is ﬁtting that Hopper dedicated this watercolor to his wife, Jo. Their courtship had begun four years earlier in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it was then that Hopper followed Jo’s advice to concentrate on painting in watercolor. Four years later, he was still at it: Cars and Rocks was one of 28 watercolors completed in Maine that summer. Source: Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

The Cat Boat 1922. Etching on copper. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Hopper pictures three men on a small sailboat, as seen from a short distance behind the stern. As the sail catches the wind, and as the skipper steers the boat toward a heavily wooded shore, his two companions sit starboard to counterbalance the boat’s lean. This scene reﬂects Hopper’s love of sailing. As a boy in Nyack, New York, he frequented Hudson River shipyards and witnessed the building and rigging of boats. At ﬁfteen, he

24 and some friends formed a sailing club, and Garret Hopper, his father, gave him the wood and tools to build a boat. Years later, Hopper conﬁded to art historian Brian O’Doherty that the boat “wasn’t very good ... I had put the center board well too far aft and she wouldn’t sail upwind very well.” The Cat Boat went through at least three states (a print pulled from the original plate is its ﬁrst state; a print from a reworked plate is called the second state, and so on). Hopper’s plate changes directed the viewers’ attention to the boat and its crew; he lightened the foliage, gave less deﬁnition to the water, and omitted parts of the rigging. When The Cat Boat was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum in 1963, art critic Emily Manchester preferred the etching’s ﬁnal state: “Standing at a little distance, and noting the effect of the prints on a wall, you may be tempted to prefer an earlier state of an etching, rather than the ﬁnal state ... [but as to] The Cat Boat— the third state is charming with the landscape held in reserve with the main feature distinct.” In 2007, a print of The Cat Boat was sold at auction for $169,000. Sources: (1) Brian O’Doherty, “Portrait: Edward Hopper” (2) Emily Manchester, “Museum Exhibits Edward Hopper.”

Chair Car 1965. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 50 in. (101.6 ¥ 127 cm), Private Collection—Chair Car was painted when Hopper was 82 years old. He shows the inside of a train car, harsh light streaming through the windows. The car is scaled larger that most railway cars and (as we often discover in Hopper’s interior settings) there is no discernible way out. In 1972 art critic John Hollander described the work as “almost a quintessential Hopper painting: a bluish parlor car on no known railroad, its interior ... is almost totally stripped down — the décor and period-style nulliﬁed, the clothes abstract of mode — and lines of window-rectangles converge ... toward a ﬁnal, closed door.” The car has only four passengers. Two are smaller ﬁgures at the far end — we see only

25 the backs of their heads. Hopper draws our attention to the side of the parlor car that catches the sunlight, where we see a woman engrossed in her reading. A woman across the aisle is watching her and seems to be wearing a quizzical look. Hopper infuses a degree of tension into this seemingly commonplace scene, a strange uneasiness, as if things are not quite what they appear to be. Originally in the collection of a New York City family who knew the artist, Chair Car was sold at a Christie’s auction in 2005 for $12.5 million, the highest price paid for a Hopper painting up to that time. Christie’s catalogue noted that Chair Car “exempliﬁed the hauntingly detached urban scenes for which the artist is most renowned ... these solitary and seemingly lonely people are central to the work, and a major theme in Hopper’s art throughout his career ... the paucity of passengers and spatial emptiness ... imply an anxious emotional state.” Sources: (1) John Hollander, “An American Painter” (2) Souren Melikian, “Hopper Leads Record-Breaking Sale.”

Charleston, South Carolina Early in April 1929 Edward and Jo Hopper left New York City by car for Charleston. The picturesque city was then attracting droves of visiting artists and writers. Hopper had no problem ﬁnding subjects; in three weeks, he produced eleven watercolors, including renderings of private homes, rural cabins and the battery at Fort Sumter. Hopper was intrigued by Charleston’s historic district. He painted Ash’s House (an elevated view of a typical mid–1880s home with a veranda), Charleston Doorway, and House with Veranda, Charleston, S.C.* His Baptistry of Saint John’s shows a quiet corner of a Lutheran church dating from the early nineteenth century. The Battery, Charleston, S.C.* features a former battleground transformed into a public park, with the park benches backed up against a large cannon pointed out to sea. His Fort and Gun* pictures a cannon, disabled and ﬁlled with concrete.

Charleston Hopper depicted Charleston’s African American culture in Cabin, Charleston, S.C.*; Negro Cabin; Charleston Slum; Folly Beach; and Automobile Near a Cabin*. He had come upon a way of life unlike any he had known and, soon after returning home, he and Jo made a point of seeing Porg y, the play based on DuBose Heyward’s 1925 best-selling novel set in Charleston. Hopper never forgot his one trip to Charleston. Twenty-six years later, he painted an oil, South Carolina Morning , showing an African American woman in hat, dress, and high heels, standing tall in a sunlit doorway. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Charleston Slum 1929. Watercolor on paper, 153 ⁄ 4 ¥ 243 ⁄ 4 in. (34.9 ¥ 62.9 cm), Private Collection — Why Hopper chose to paint this section of an African American ghetto, and then title it Charleston Slum, is an open question. He shows two large structures that at one time may have been impressive single-family homes, a similar, somewhat smaller house, and desperate ramshackle housing below. Local curator Angela Mack locates the scene at 56 Washington Street in the northeastern part of Charleston, where laborers in the local hospital and dressmakers had been crowded together for twenty years. “The three-story house in the center of the composition,” Mack notes, “was once a grand Charleston single house, stripped by 1929 of the multi-story piazza that had adorned its southern side.” Using light and shadow and a strong palette, Hopper brought drama to the scene. He emphasized the terra-cotta roofs of two of the buildings and splashed that same roof color on the shanties. Flanked by a light sky and a yellow grassy foreground, all the structures seem somehow stronger, more upright. He also eliminated a storage tank that rose behind the largest house. “To include the looming container,” Mack observes, “would have detracted from the import of the house and obscured the design of the composition.”

Chase Charleston Slum was included in the 2006 exhibit at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina; the painting had not been shown in three decades. New York art collector Edith K. Ehrman had purchased it in 1972. Upon her death Christie’s auctioned off Charleston Slum to an unidentiﬁed buyer in 2001 for $1.9 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a Hopper watercolor. (In its auction catalog, Christie’s titled the painting Charleston.) Source: Angela D. Mack, Edward Hopper in Charleston.

Chase, William Merritt (1849–1916) William Merritt Chase was Hopper’s ﬁrst painting teacher. Well-known as an American impressionist painter, Chase was considered the most important American art teacher of his generation. He was born in Indiana but studied at the Royal Academy in Munich. He later taught at the Art Students League of New York and then opened the Chase School of Art, which in 1898 became the New York School of Art. Chase once told his students: “It is not the subject, but what the painter makes of his subject that constitutes a great painting.” He urged his students to copy work they admired: “Absolute originality in art can only be found in a man who has been locked in a dark room from babyhood.... Since we are dependent on others, let us frankly and openly take in all that we can.” Chase stayed on as instructor until 1907, when he left after a bitter struggle with Robert Henri over their differing approaches to the teaching of art. Source: Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase: Modern American Landscapes, 1886 –1890.

Chatterton, Clarence K. (1880– 1973) Chatterton (Chat) was Hopper’s classmate at the New York School of Art, where they studied under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. In 1914 and the years following, Hopper and Chatterton met up at the summer art colonies in Ogunquit and Monhegan,

26 Maine. The two became lifelong friends; Hopper looked up to Chatterton as the older brother he never had. In 1915 Chatterton became the artist-inresidence at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, teaching courses in applied art. His art department became a model for academic art programs in colleges and universities across the nation. He remained at Vassar for 33 years, retiring in 1948. He also became a seminal ﬁgure in 20th century realism, enjoying a long and illustrious career. Like Hopper, he found many of his painting subjects in New England towns. Brian O’Doherty argues that Chatterton’s work approaches Hopper’s “sophisticated detachment,” and that many of Chatterton’s paintings “could be mistaken for Hopper’s.” Source: Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Chop Suey 1929. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 38 in. (81.3 ¥ 96.5 cm), collection of Barney A. Ebsworth— Here, Hopper features two women seated in a somewhat upscale and yet inexpensive second-ﬂoor Chinese restaurant, much like the one the Hoppers frequented in the early years of their marriage. By the late 1920s, chop suey had become all the rage in American cities. Louis Armstrong’s ﬁrst jazz composition, recorded in 1926 with his Hot Five, was titled “Cornet Chop Suey.” The New York Times took notice: “Chop suey has been promoted to a prominent place on the midday menu of the metropolis.... It has become a staple. It is vigorously vieing with sandwiches and salads as the noontime nourishment of the young woman typists and telephonists.” Hopper shows two of these young women in Chop Suey. They sit, somewhat stifﬂy, at a window table. The restaurant interior, shown in blacks and grays and browns, takes up the left half of the canvas. Outside the window that takes up the right half is a gaudy red and white sign, with SUEY spelled out in blue light bulbs. The light from the sign seeps into the dark restaurant interior and brightens the

27 window frame, the cloche hats and sweaters of the young women, a coat hanging on a wall peg, and the restaurant’s white tabletops. Hopper’s skilled calibration of the elements of color, composition and light is nowhere more evident than in Chop Suey. In 2008 Barney Ebsworth told art historian Rose Aidin how he felt, 34 years earlier, when he paid $180,000 to acquire Chop Suey: “I knew how great the picture was, and that the price was fair, I just didn’t think I should spend that much money on a picture ... ten years ago I was offered $60 million for the painting. Today the market has gone crazy, and there are no great Hoppers left. So who knows what it’s worth — and I’m not selling anyway.” Sources: (1) Bertram Reinitz, “Chop Suey’s New Role” (2) Rose Aidin, “A Wall for Every Work: An Interview with Barney Ebsworth.”

Church in Eastham* 1948. Watercolor on paper, 197 ⁄8 ¥ 251 ⁄ 2 in. (50.5 ¥ 63.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York —“I wish I could paint more ... but I don’t have the impulse,” Hopper told an interviewer in January of 1948, “I do dozens of sketches for oils—just a few lines on yellow typewriter paper—and then I almost always burn them.” Following prostate surgery in February, he went for months without picking up a brush and his slump lasted through the summer at Cape Cod. Then, over a twoweek period in September, he worked on and ﬁnished an oil, Seven A.M., and began scouting the area for a watercolor subject, but with no success. He eventually found his subject in Eastham, about eight miles down Route 6 from South Truro, Cape Cod. Church in Eastham shows only a cropped view of the clapboard church at the left. At the right, a tree-lined street runs diagonally to a utility pole at the painting’s center background; the utility pole, looking more like a cruciﬁx, is the work’s focus. This was the ﬁfth time Hopper found inspiration in Eastham. Earlier he had painted House at Eastham; House with Big Pine; Oaks at Eastham (1936) and Route 6, Eastham. Source: “Art: Traveling Man,” Time.

Cinematic

Church of San Esteban 1946. Watercolor on paper, 221 ⁄ 4 ¥ 301 ⁄ 2 in. (56.5 ¥ 77.5 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Edward and Jo Hopper studied Spanish in anticipation of their second trip to Mexico. They had taken a train on their 1943 Mexican visit; this time they went by car, traveling by way of New Orleans and Texas to Saltillo. The Arizpe Sainz Hotel provided them with a room that opened onto the roof, giving Hopper access to a view of San Esteban, a mission church dating back to 1592. And yet he had trouble getting started, for the afternoon rains often struck just as he was preparing to paint. The skies ﬁnally lightened. Hopper focused on the detailed architectural shapes of rooftops, of adjacent buildings and of the church steeple. His emphasis on detail and his more deliberate approach are, for curator Virginia Mecklenburg, the hallmarks of the late watercolors: “Hopper depicted the accumulation of towers, ﬂat walls bleached by the brilliant sunlight, and delicate patterns of cast shadows using a lightly textured paper that emphasizes surfaces, as does his relatively dry application of paint.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places (2) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

cinematic effects “In Hopper’s work,” observes art curator Robert Hobbs, “the assumed viewer is analogous to a camera in a ﬁlm.... The camera analogy is important, for it enabled Hopper to be intimate and distant, to show glimpses of people’s everyday lives without seeming to invade their privacy.... The observer then becomes an actor, the painting a script, and the play a reading of the script by the actor/ viewer.” Hobbs makes a good point. Hopper created a number of his scenes as if they were ﬁlm sets. He and his wife Jo created “characters” by giving the painted ﬁgures names, nationalities, occupations and, occasionally, a state of mind. In the ledger book Jo used stage directions to

Circle indicate the location of light and shadow. Scholar Gerd Gemünden notes Hopper’s “proximity to cinema”; his “tendency to paint objects, people, and buildings with the ‘eye of the camera’; his perspectives “only imaginable from a mounted camera”; glimpses of ﬁgures that evoke “the feeling of a traveling shot or a dolly shot.” Film directors are struck by Hopper’s use of light to create mood. At the start of his ﬁlm noir Force of Evil in 1948, Abraham Polonsky showed his cinematographer George Barnes a book of Edward Hopper paintings as an example of the visual mood he was seeking; one wide-angle scene in the ﬁlm is patterned after Hopper’s Ofﬁce at Night. In Road to Perdition, ﬁlm director Sam Mendes uses Hopperesque lighting: “You look at an Edward Hopper painting,” he writes, “and you can study where the light sources are.... Often, the key to his paintings is where he places the light sources.... In New York Movie, which shows an usherette standing at the side of a cinema, the lighting of the scene is absolutely the source of its poetry.” Sources: (1) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper (2) Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions (3) Ray Zone, “A Master of Mood.”

The Circle Theatre 1936. Oil on canvas, 27 ¥ 36 in. (68.6 ¥ 91.4 cm), Private Collection — The “Circle” in the title refers to Columbus Circle, a New York City landmark at Broadway and Central Park West. We see a huge theatre, a subway entrance in front, adjoining stores, a newsstand, advertising signs, and a trafﬁc light. The only signs of life are two diminutive ﬁgures, a woman standing in front of the theater and, to the right, a man at the newsstand. A sour greenish light emphasizes the forlorn emptiness of the area. The forms in the painting seem to lack depth, as if each element is pasted on top of the one behind. The newsstand is situated in front of a subway entrance, which in turn blocks the theater entrance and marquee, obliterating most of its name. Hopper is showing us some

28 elements while hiding others, as if he’s playing a game of hide and seek with the viewer. “One of the most intense elements in the painting,” writes scholar Robert Silberman, “is the visual exclamation point presented by the red glow of a trafﬁc light on the lower right.... The theater is the nominal subject of the painting and its central presence, but it is incorporated into an ensemble of forms.” Source: Robert Silberman, “Edward Hopper and the Theater of the Mind: Vision, Spectacle, and the Spectator.”

The City 1927. Oil on canvas, 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 37 in. (69.9 ¥ 94 cm), The University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona — One of Hopper’s ﬁrst New York City scenes, The City depicts a Washington Square North neighborhood from the vantage point of a rooftop overhang. Hopper places an apartment building, perhaps six stories high, in the center foreground, show ing its mansard roof, arched windows and ornate curved facade. It belongs to an earlier uniformity of the surrounding apartments. Like Hopper, it stands alone in the midst of change, stubbornly holding on to its individuality. Jutting up from the neighborhood’s rooftops are the middle ﬂoors of multistory buildings. By including them, is Hopper protesting the encroachment of the skyscraper? In the 1920s tall ofﬁce buildings dotted Washington Square, and the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest, stood a mile to the south. Hopper considered all such commercial buildings as vertical monstrosities. “Hopper’s refusal to engage in the skyline craze,” argues art historian Robert Henkes, “results in his usual intimate reﬂections on the human condition in scenes void of the human presence.” Source: Robert Henkes, Themes in American Painting.

City Roofs 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 36 in. (73.7 ¥ 91.4 cm), Private Collection —City Roofs depicts a

29 scene thoroughly familiar to Hopper, one he saw out the window of his top ﬂoor studio at 3 Washington Square North in New York City. Hopper places the vents, chimneys and skylights into a geometric design, and ﬂoods them in sunlight. Art historian Avis Berman notes that these elements easily outbalance a building looming in the background, a “spectacular Art Deco apartment house on One Fifth Avenue.” Hopper strips the building of its architectural ﬂourishes; what remains, writes Berman, is “a routine monolith with little personality in comparison with the eccentricities of color, shape and intensity of light that enlivens the skylights and chimneys on his own roof.” Source: Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York.

City Sunlight 1954. Oil on canvas, 283 ⁄16 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (71.6 ¥ 101.9 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.— Here, a woman in a pink slip sits at a mahogany table staring listlessly at nothing in particular. Her body language speaks of resignation and/or disappointment. Hopper seems to have made her too small; she is overwhelmed by the outsized furnishings and windows. Hopper’s palette is muted and nondescript, in keeping with the lifeless room and bereft woman. In its loneliness, the painting is Hopperesque. “Edward Hopper belongs to a particular category of artists,” writes Swiss philosopher and author Alain de Botton, “whose work appears sad but does not make us sad.... His ﬁgures look as though they are far from home ... their faces are vulnerable and introspective. They have perhaps just left someone or been left, they are in search of work, sex or company, adrift in transient places ... and yet, despite the bleakness Hopper’s paintings depict, they are not themselves bleak to look at—perhaps because they allow us as viewers to witness an echo of our own griefs and disappointments, and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by them.” Source: Alain de Botton, “How to See Sadness Without Being Sad.”

Clancy

Civil War Campground 1926. Watercolor on paper, 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 4 in. (34.3 ¥ 48.9 cm), The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Missouri — The real importance of this rather ordinary rural landscape rests in its historical signiﬁcance. In 1861, Tillson’s Hill in Rockland, Maine, served as a Civil War staging area known as Camp Knox. Ten companies of volunteers from the Rockland area camped here prior to leaving for the South. Hopper painted the area only because of these historical facts. Tillson’s Hill had changed little since 1861, except for the intrusion of telephone poles and wires. The poles and wires were useful to Hopper, for they added a dramatic vertical element to an otherwise ﬂat and barren scene. Between 1926 and 1940, Hopper produced ﬁve paintings related to the Civil War. When asked by John Morse in 1959 about his interest in military history, Hopper replied he had “always been interested in the history of the Civil War, and I have the photographic history of the Civil War in which [Mathew] Brady’s photographs predominate.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper (2) Interview between Edward Hopper and John Morse.

Clancy, John C. (1897–1981) John Clancy was a longtime assistant at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in Manhattan. Clancy claimed that he was Rehn’s alter ego, and as such was really the one in charge. He was on hand when Hopper ﬁrst happened upon the gallery in 1924, asking to show his watercolors. Interviewed in 1970, Clancy remembered the occasion and its aftermath: “Rehn ... was perfectly fascinated with them. He said, ‘I like these; I’d like to show them.’ ... Then we began to show them to different people and they got all excited. John T. Spaulding, the noted Boston collector, was one of the ﬁrst purchasers.... In fact, [he] used to hang his Hoppers right next to his Homers.” When Rehn suffered a stroke in September of 1953, Clancy assumed full management.

Clark Upon Rehn’s death in 1956, Clancy purchased the gallery and continued its operation under the name Rehn Gallery until 1981. Hopper’s initial fears about John Clancy’s ability to take over and carry on at the gallery proved unfounded; in his ﬁrst year of stewardship Clancy’s sales of Hopper art amounted to more than $30,000. In 1970 Clancy looked back on the Rehn Gallery’s 46 years representing Hopper: “The ﬁrst things we showed were the watercolors. And then ... we had a combination watercolor paintings and oils show. As a matter of fact numerically we’ve had very few Hopper shows.... We never had enough new things together at one time to do that ... I don’t think we’ve had more than a half a dozen Hopper shows. And that’s going from 1924 up until the time of his death.” Source: Interview between John Clancy and Paul Cummings.

Clark, Stephen Carlton (1862–1960) An heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Company fortune, millionaire Stephen C. Clark was a devoted collector and promoter of American art, especially the works of Edward Hopper. His taste was for the more aggressive, challenging and bold side of art. He helped organize the 1913 Armory Show, and later became a founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he served as president of the board. Clark was instrumental in jump-starting Hopper’s career. John Clancy, who helped manage the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in New York City when Hopper ﬁrst exhibited there in 1924, discussed Clark in a 1970 interview: “One of the ﬁrst oils that we sold was to Stephen Clark; that was the House by the Railroad (1925), which he gave to the MoMA (which, incidentally, was the start of their collection). Hopper was the ﬁrst picture they acquired ... Clark remained a great admirer of Hopper up until the time he died. And I think he bought more Hoppers than any museum or any collector in the country. He had a marvelous eye. He had a great collection.”

30 Sources: (1) Michael Conforti, The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings (2) Interview between John Clancy and Paul Cummings.

Coast Guard Station 1927. Watercolor, gouache, and charcoal on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — In the summer of 1927, Hopper worked on four watercolors of the Coast Guard station at Two Lights, on Cape Elizabeth, Maine. This painting is the most ambitious of the four. It resembles a picture postcard; the Metropolitan Museum website calls the work a “sunny, tranquil landscape,” and notes that the “water and the rocks in the foreground are painted in loose, limpid washes of color.” Lifesaving involves peril; a surfman’s life was hardly “tranquil.” Curator Virginia Mecklenburg cites a historian of Cape Elizabeth: “At night a coast watch was maintained in fourhour shifts ... it took a man of unusual stamina to face the subzero cold and howling gales of the winter months in keeping this constant vigil. Mecklenburg concludes that the “sunlight and clear skies of this and the other Two Lights watercolors give no hint of the treacherous conditions that send the surfmen into action. Only the boulders in the foreground attest to the danger of running aground.” Sources: (1) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, “Edward Hopper’s Houses” (2) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Coast Guard Station 1929. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm), Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey—This was Hopper’s ﬁfth and ﬁnal painting of the Coast Guard station at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and it is strikingly different from the four picturesque watercolors he had produced two years earlier (one with the same title, Coast Guard Station). Art historian Janet Comey describes the station as Hopper saw it: “The building—now destroyed—had a square tower, a sloping roof, attached boat storage sheds, various lean-tos, and chimneys. In short,

31 it was just the type of geometrically complex structure Hopper liked to portray. The sunlight cast interestingly shaped shadows, and the building’s aspect changed completely depending on the angle of view.” Hopper’s 1927 Coast Guard Station, like the others painted that year, is a charming midday scene, and offers no hint of the station’s perilous rescue and recovery function. The 1929 oil, in contrast, shows the facility in late afternoon shadows, almost completely dark except for the lookout tower and a wall closest to the sea — these are shown in the brilliant white of the setting sun. Two windows in black at the top of the tower have the appearance of watchful eyes. This Coast Guard station, unlike the ones in 1927, seems tense and on guard. Source: Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses* 1930–33. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 2 ¥ 423 ⁄ 4 in. (72.4 ¥ 108.6 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — In the ﬁrst of their 36 summers in South Truro, Cape Cod, Edward and Jo Hopper rented a small cottage located on farmland owned by A.B. Burleigh Cobb. The Hoppers had found the perfect quiet getaway from New York City and its hectic pace. The area, far up the cape, had few houses and no hotels or tourists. Inspired, Hopper worked that summer on seven oils and twenty-two watercolors. Art historian Deborah Lyons describes Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses: “Rolling hills dominate this view of the area, with the sky reduced to a minimal strip at the top of the composition— it is the land that is expansive, organized in strata, the scene is viewed from above, perhaps from the top of one of the softly rounded hills. Particularly strong in this work ... is the warm radiant rendition of light.... This wide, verdant landscape is ... a wonderful symbiosis between the natural and artiﬁcial. These buildings are of the land, their rusty colors playing beautiful counterpoint to the acidic greens of their surroundings.”

Color Source: Susan Larsen and Deborah Lyons, “Edward Hopper: Painter of Modern Life.”

color Art historian Yves Bonnefoy is amused at the vast difference between Hopper’s mature palette and the one he started off with in his student days. Bonnefoy pokes fun at Hopper’s style in those early years: “Reddish tones mixed with orange in an oily white, painted on a dark background, as if the tangible world were a brothel where the painter ventures only by the half-light of lamps veiled in red ... the teachers at the New York School of Art, which the young Hopper attended, seem to have held their classes in some cellar of the house of Usher, behind tapestries stirred by a wind coming from beyond the grave.” Hopper’s second palette ran to the opposite extreme. Working in Paris in 1907, he abandoned his “black style.” “Along the quais of the Seine, where the water glistens,” notes Bonnefoy, “he begins to paint works in which color seems free of any evil dream, any phantasm — works that are certainly among the brightest that any modern gaze has created.” Hopper’s third palette, the one that satisﬁed his needs, emerged in the 1920s, and earned this comment from Forbes Watson in 1929: “The very limitations of Hopper’s color seem to have proved an advantage to him, as if, by limiting, it sharpened his penetration into the character of man-made structures. His color, never far away from the potentialities of black and white, has a sobriety of tone which ignores, or possibly derides at heart, the sensual magnetism of a richer and more complex palette.” Art historian James Thrall Soby understands the place of color in Hopper’s mature art: “Even his admirers tend to speak cautiously of him as a colorist.... But that is not the point. Hopper’s color is the quiet but trained handmaiden of his romantic-realist conviction; it does not claim the autonomous excitement to which the post-impressionists’ innovations opened the way.... Within its functions, however, Hopper’s tonal control is changeable and deft, and its solidity compensates for a lack of

Compartment textural interest. Moreover, his color’s ‘abstract’ contribution to mood and to design is more important than generally acknowledged.” Sources: (1) Yves Bonnefoy, “The Photosynthesis of Being” (2) Forbes Watson, “A Note on Edward Hopper” (3) James Thrall Soby, “Arrested Time by Edward Hopper.”

Compartment C, Car 293 1938. Oil on canvas, 20 ¥ 18 in. (50.8 ¥ 45.7 cm), IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York— Everything in this railroad car except for a lone female passenger is rendered in a light green. Hopper was drawn, writes Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, “to the introspective mood that travelling seems to put us into. He captured the atmosphere in half-empty carriages making their way across the landscape: the silence that reigns inside while the wheels beat in rhythm against the rails outside, the dreaminess fostered by the noise and the view from the windows—a dreaminess in which we seem to stand outside our normal selves and have access to thoughts and memories that may not emerge in more settled circumstances.” De Botton senses that the woman in this painting is in such a frame of mind. The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) acquired Compartment C, Car 293 for $1,000 soon after its completion. In 1942, the AIC returned the painting to Hopper’s dealer Frank K.M. Rehn in exchange for Nighthawks, paying Rehn an additional $3,000. The AIC’s Judith Barter notes that Compartment C, Car 293 and Nighthawks both feature “a contemplative ﬁgure in an interior bathed in an artiﬁcial light.” Sources: (1) Alain de Botton, “The Pleasure of Sadness” (2) Judith A. Barter, “Nighthawks: Transcending Reality.”

composition Hopper’s skill in composition is critical to the unsettling effect that he achieves. “No painter has ever manipulated compositions so purposefully as Hopper,” writes art critic Parker Tyler. “Hopper’s scenes are always composed rather than copied.”

32 The foundation of his mature work rests on large, simple geometric forms incorporating strong horizontals, verticals and diagonals. In an essay on Hopper completed the day before Hopper died, Lloyd Goodrich observed that “Hopper’s design has grown more complex with the years.... [This is] a starkly simple composition, in which the dominant horizontals are broken by a few upright forms and by the repeated vertical patterns of doorways and windows ... in Nighthawks, on the other hand, simple horizontality has been replaced by a more complex design, in which the strong wedge form of the restaurant, thrusting from right to left, is countered by the solid row of buildings at right angles to it. This more dynamic kind of composition indicates a steady growth in Hopper’s concept of design.” “Hopper’s works appear to be ‘hard-edge’ paintings,” writes art curator Henry Geldzahler, but “on closer examination we see this is an illusion created by the sureness of his touch.... It is not tightness of technique, but clarity of composition.... It is in fact the tension between the intimacy of his subject matter and the calculated, concealed geometry of his composition that produces the atmosphere of stillness and isolation.” Sources: (1) Parker Tyler, “Hopper/Pollack” (2) Lloyd Goodrich, “Edward Hopper” (3) Henry Geldzahler, “Edward Hopper.”

Conference at Night 1949. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 405 ⁄ 16 in. (71.8 ¥ 102.6 cm), Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas—Hopper shared the fact that this painting’s composition was in his mind for quite some time. Conference at Night shows two men and a woman in an ofﬁce setting. The scene reminds us of ﬁlm noir, with its strong theatrical lighting and a cast of characters that seem to be up to something shady. The Wichita Art Museum’s website description of Conference at Night includes this statement: “The painting is classic Hopper in its theme of voyeuristic glimpses of the city at night and its masterful exposition of such

33 favored compositional devices as an open window, a near-empty room in a utilitarian structure, strongly-directed light from an unseen source, and anonymous ﬁgures engaged in some undeﬁned yet intense social exchange.” After obtaining Conference at Night, the Wichita Art Museum wrote to Hopper, asking for a description of how the painting came about. Art historian Avis Berman quotes from Hopper’s reply in her Edward Hopper’s New York: “I appreciate that the general public likes to have its Art explained in words. It is going to be difﬁcult for me to make words do much for Conference at Night. The idea of a loft or business building with the artiﬁcial light of the street coming into the room at night had been in my mind for some years before I attempted it. And had been suggested by things I had seen on Broadway in walking there at night. The attempt to give a concrete expression to a very amorphous impression is the insurmountable difﬁculty in painting. The result was obtained by improvisation, and from no known fact or scene.” Source: Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York.

Corn Hill, Truro 1930. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm), Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas — Painted during Hopper’s ﬁrst summer in South Truro, Cape Cod, Corn Hill, Truro shows the rolling dunes of Corn Hill Beach, located just above Cape Cod Bay on the outer arm of the cape between Provincetown and Wellﬂeet. In 1962 Hopper told Katharine Kuh his reasons for going to the cape: “I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous—perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.” In South Truro as in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Hopper avoided painting the typical beach and ocean views. Gregory Dicum, writing in the New York Times, describes South Truro as it might have inspired Hopper: “As

Custom the sun sinks toward Provincetown, it cuts through a hazy summer sky.... It picks out Corn Hill, at the north side of the beach, and daubs the tiny cottages at its crest in sure, vibrant strokes.” Dicum points out that “the particular aspect of Cape light that appealed to Hopper comes when the summer sun starts to toy with setting, dropping just under the remains of an unsettled afternoon sky. It can last for hours, or just seconds, but that is what Hopper chose to carry back to his studio.” Jo Hopper’s ledger book entry focuses on Hopper’s palette: the green in his grass, the blue shadows, the pale sky. Not to be outdone, Jo also painted Corn Hill, but in watercolor. Sources: (1) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (2) Gregory Dicum, “Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light.” (3) Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Custom House, Portland 1927. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut — Hopper’s painting does little justice to the U.S. Custom House located on the waterfront at Portland, Maine. This structure has changed little since its completion in 1872. A skillful blend of the Renaissance Revival and Second Empire styles, composed of New Hampshire granite and a slate-shingled roof, it stands three stories, taking up a full city block. This painting shows little of its grandeur. Hopper restricts the scene to a tiny rear segment of the building’s ﬁrst ﬂoor. We glimpse only the large and handsome rhythmic, round-headed windows with their simple keystones, and a fraction of the heavy cast-iron embankment railing designed of tangent ovals. Hopper ignores the magniﬁcent front entrance, the twin mansard-roofed cupolas rising at the top, and other architectural ﬂourishes. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg comments that Hopper’s “bleak depiction” reﬂects “little in the way of architectural strength.” But that was Hopper’s way. He was concerned with the design elements of his composition, not with

D. & R.G. the building’s grandeur. Why else would he insert a large utility pole in front of the building, and a drab commercial building, perhaps a factory, off to the left? Hopper painted this scene on a rainy day, most likely from inside his car across the street from the Custom House. This may explain his extreme close-up view and his muted palette. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors

D. & R.G. Locomotive 1925. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Hopper began to sketch trains during his childhood in Nyack, New York, and railroads are a recurring motif in his etching and painting. Hopper found this Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad locomotive (#177) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The powerful locomotive, the scene’s dominant element, is shown in the “heavy iron and steel details,” writes artist and author Gerry Souter, with “stabs of colour and shadows that typiﬁed his industrial portraits of ships, bridges and railways to come.” Curator Virginia Mecklenburg places D. & R.G. Locomotive among Hopper’s “most beautiful railroad pictures. The ﬂuid handling of the sky and embankment and the solidity of the engine show just how thoroughly Hopper had mastered the watercolor medium ... the sky is a wash of color over white paper; the foreground a symphony in blue and green.” Most likely it was the locomotive, and not the scenery, that caught Hopper’s eye. In 1955 art scholar Milton W. Brown related this story of Hopper’s visit to New Mexico: “He wandered for days disconsolate because amidst all the splendor of the southwestern landscape he could ﬁnd nothing to paint. He ﬁnally returned one day happy with a water color of an abandoned locomotive.” Brown sensed that “New Mexico did not conform to Hopper’s idea of America. There was probably too much sheer beauty in it, too much natural composition. The locomotive must have made him feel at home, like an American tourist in

34 the depths of Europe confronted by a sign advertising Coca-Cola.” Sources: (1) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (2) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper, The Watercolors (3) Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression.

Dauphinée House 1932. Oil on canvas, 34 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (86.4 ¥ 127.6 cm), Private Collection — Hopper had ﬁrst painted this scene in watercolor in 1931, calling it Captain Kelly’s House, after the original owner. Henry and Constance Dauphinée, later purchased the property, and became friends with Edward and Jo Hopper. Hopper shows the South Truro house standing behind railroad tracks, engulfed by encroaching trees and foliage. When the work was exhibited in 1988 in “Edward Hopper: Light Years” at the Hirschl & Adler Galleries in New York City, it caught the eye of art critic Roberta Smith: “Finally, don’t miss the ‘Dauphinée House,’” she wrote, “with its opaque windows and doors that look like Brice Marden abstractions, agitated white paint where its clapboard should be, and a surrounding landscape that quietly roils with anxiety.” In 2006 art scholar Matt Backer had a similar take: “Despite ... the dirt road, the house itself is unsettlingly unwelcoming. The door is closed, as are all of the shutters but one, which only affords a view of darkness. Secondary features in the composition exacerbate our distanced feeling. Just before the house lies a railroad which formally separates the viewer from the house and creates a sense of horizontal movement.... This sense of horizontal movement suggests that the viewer sees the house from ... an automobile speeding along the highway parallel to the railroad tracks. The blurry bushes of the background further complement our sense of movement.” The anxiety felt by Smith and Backer may also result from the fact that the house seems lifeless, inauthentic, more like a prop or perhaps part of a model train setting. In his essay “Hopperesque,” Peter Schjeldahl writes that

35 Hopper’s “most conventional, most realist works” are of buildings, but that these works have Hopperesque qualities, which he deﬁnes as “the narrow margin by which they transcend visual description for psychological symbolism ... [in] Hopper building: we rarely see a door clearly, and when we do it rarely looks operable let alone inviting.” Whatever its strengths or shortcomings, Dauphinée House sold at Sotheby’s New York for $687,500 in 1987. Sources: (1) Roberta Smith, “Review/Art: The Real World and Edward Hopper” (2) Matt Backer, “Edward Hopper: An Artist in Pursuit of Desire” (3) Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl.

Davis House 1926. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm), Collection of Harriet and Mortimer Spiller — In 1926 the Hoppers found room and board at 42 Middle Street in Gloucester, Massachusetts, just a few doors down and across the street from 35 Middle Street, the residence of Mattie Davis, the widow of a ﬁsh dealer. In the 1920s artists liked to set up shop in front of the Davis house in order to paint the Universalist Meeting House across the street, at the corner of Church and Middle Streets. Hopper, too, wanted to paint the Universalist Church, but arriving there he was unable to ﬁnd a vantage point among the crowd of artists. Making the best of the situation, he took his easel and paints across the street and, looking back over the heads of the others, he proceeded to paint the Davis house. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg describes the elements of the house: “the cornices over ﬁrst and second ﬂoor windows and under the eaves, the rectangular fan lights on the bowfront entrance, the curved rooﬂine of the dormers, and the ﬁnials at the corners of the decorative railings of the widow’s walk,” elements that to Mecklenburg “speak to the prosperity and comfort of the building’s earliest residents.” Hopper is often linked to houses that are dark and even foreboding, such as House by

Dawn the Railroad (1925). In his Gloucester houses, the reverse is true. Like The Mansard Roof (1923) and Haskell’s House (1924), Davis House is a welcoming place, with the shutters open, the curtains separated, the shades raised. The entranceway (an architectural feature often omitted by Hopper) is the painting’s focal point. Later in the summer of 1926, Hopper reversed his position, and from the front of the Davis house he produced Universalist Church, a watercolor of the structure’s rooﬂine. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Dawn in Pennsylvania 1942. Oil on canvas, 243 ⁄ 8 ¥ 441 ⁄4 in. (61.9 ¥ 112.4 cm), Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois — This is the eeriest of Hopper’s depictions of railroads, lit only by the cold gray light of dawn. We are taken up into an elevated railroad station where we see the tail end of a railway car and, on the platform, an empty luggage cart. Beyond the tracks are darkened factory buildings, awaiting the ﬁrst shift of workers. Curator Judith Barter feels that Hopper’s impulse was aesthetic: “the luggage cart and arched forms of the station ... recall the oblique angles and eerie moodiness of Giorgio de Chirico’s railway stations and demonstrate surrealism’s inﬂuence on Hopper’s work.” Writing for the Terra Foundation, art historian Paula Wisotzki sees another motivation: “Edward Hopper often used the railroad as a theme to signal the rootlessness and anonymity of modern life. In Dawn in Pennsylvania, the setting and light create a sense of suspense ... despite the title’s suggestion of sunrise, the unnaturally colored light suggests an artiﬁcial radiance compounding the scene’s bleakness. Dawn in Pennsylvania was painted just a few months after Hopper created his well-known Nighthawks.... Each work seems removed from current events, an escape from the United States’ precipitous entry into World War II.” Hopper never saw a need to explain his

Day paintings. In the end, we have no way of knowing why he chose to paint Dawn in Pennsylvania. Sources: (1) Judith A. Barter, “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” (2) Paula Wisotzki, “Dawn in Pennsylvania, Edward Hopper.”

Day After the Funeral 1925. Watercolor on paper, 15 ¥ 20 inches (38.1 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection — There is good reason to believe that this painting was Hopper’s spontaneous response to the death, at age 42, of his friend and fellow artist George Bellows in January of 1925. We know that Hopper wept upon ﬁrst hearing the news, and that he and Jo Hopper were at the funeral held at Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue, three blocks north of their apartment. Joseph Russell Taylor, who was also there (Bellows had painted his portrait in 1912). A biographer of Bellows provides Taylor’s account of the funeral service: “There were twenty-four of us his friends who were ‘pallbearers,’ all artists, many of them famous ... George ... would have found no fault with the simple ritual ... the music constituted the whole service.... Then they took him to Greenwood and we came away.” Day After the Funeral shows two women in black making their way along a deserted wintry street. Most critics believe that Hopper meant one of the women to be Emma Bellows, his friend’s widow. Hopper’s inclusion of snow, a rarity for him, may have been a way to express his feelings for Bellows. Hopper knew that Bellows loved snow, that Bellows had ﬁrst mastered issues of color, composition and paint application in a series of winter paintings between 1907 and 1915. Source: Mary Sayre Haverstock, George Bellows: An Artist in Action.

de Chirico, Giorgio (1888–1978) Jan Krugier, the legendary art dealer, died late in 2008. David D’Arcy proﬁled Krugier’s 50-year career in Art & Auction, noting that “although he generally dismissed U.S.-born artists, he admired Edward Hopper, calling

36 him ‘the American de Chirico’ for his depiction of mute, empty spaces.” Krugier, a survivor of Nazi concentration camps, may have been struck by the aura of melancholy and silence in Hopper’s art. Both Hopper and de Chirico presented surrealistic, dreamlike imagery: empty walkways, skewed perspectives, deep and often irrational shadows. They came at this task, however, from opposite ends: de Chirico made the unreal seem real, while Hopper, at times, made the real seem unreal. Hopper was just beginning to make a name for himself when the surrealists were exhibiting. Curator Judith Barter senses that “Hopper learned from de Chirico and the later surrealists, whose works captured the imagination of New York.” In 1936 Hopper attended the “Fantastic Art: Dada, surrealism” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which included works by de Chirico, and thought highly of the artists. Barter notes that he “appreciated their technical solidity, their bold color, and their manipulation of form and perspective.” The surrealists tried to lay claim to de Chirico and to Hopper, but both refused to be identiﬁed with the movement. De Chirico and Hopper each arrived at a mature style before surrealism emerged; that style was connected to something deep within and unrelated to art movements and labels. Sources: (1) David D’Arcy, “Last of the Breed” (2) Judith A. Barter, “Nighthawks: Transcending Reality.”

Deck of Beam Trawler 1923. Watercolor on paper, 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts — Hopper completed seven watercolors of beam trawlers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the period 1923–24. This one is of a ﬁshing trawler at dockside, awaiting its next trip into open waters. The view is of amidships, seen from the stern. There are two focal points, the ship’s foremast at left center and, at the right, a red windlass. Given the chance in November of 1923 to be part of a group exhibition (400 works in

37 all) at the Brooklyn Museum, Hopper submitted Deck of Beam Trawler and Beam Trawler, the Seal (1923) along with The Mansard Roof (1923) and three other watercolors. Helen Appleton Read, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s art critic, singled Hopper out for praise: “A yellow frame house of the ordinary suburban model or an 1890 mansion of the mansard roof type is not exactly paintable if seen as such. But Mr. Hopper shows us the mansard mansion with a gale almost blowing its awnings away ... an exposition of clear, bright windswept atmosphere. Mr. Hopper also painted tugboats and ship’s machinery with an equally seeing eye. His choice of subjects remind me of those late 1890 discussions occasioned by Kipling’s poem ‘The Liner She’s a Lady,’ as to whether a work of art could really be a work of art of the ﬁrst order if its subject dealt with steamboats and engines.” Source: Helen Appleton Read, “Brooklyn Museum Emphasizes New Talent in Initial Exhibition.”

Degas, Edgar (1834–1917) In 1960 art critic Katharine Kuh asked Hopper, “What painters from the past do you admire?” Hopper named three: “Rembrandt, above all, and the etcher Méryon ... I also like Degas very much.” Like Hopper, Degas had followed his own artistic instincts, resisting all labels. He became disenchanted with the Salon in Paris and the fashion of painting historical scenes, and instead began to paint modern urban scenes. He and a group of young artists exhibited independently, calling themselves realists, drawing inspiration from their surroundings and experiences. Somewhat later, his colleagues took on the term impressionist, but Degas rejected the term. Impressionism demanded that an artist be spontaneous; Degas insisted that no art was less spontaneous than his, and that, instead, his art was the result of reﬂection and of the study of the great masters. His rejection of art movements and his deliberate approach to composition link Degas to Hopper. They were alike in other ways. Curator Sheena Wagstaff

Dories points out that Hopper’s use of dramatic cropping, emphatic diagonals and unusual perspective brings to mind the work of Degas, whose ... ‘framing’ of the subject in relationship to its composition was of considerable importance for Hopper.” Sources: (1) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (2) Sheena Wagstaff, “The Elation of Sunlight.”

Les Deux Pigeons 1920. Etching on copper. Platemark: 81 ⁄ 2 ¥ 9 ⁄8 in. (21.6 ¥ 25.1 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania—Hopper shows a couple locked in a romantic embrace, like two lovebirds. Nothing else matters to them — not the waiter, not the two elderly men sitting close by, not the scenic view from the French café terrace. Hopper’s friend Lloyd Goodrich felt that Les Deux Pigeons “revealed a surprising tender sensuality.” “Hopper forged his unique vision through the medium of etching,” writes artist John A. Parks. “A bold spareness ... had been noted in his work, but in 1915 he began to use the ﬁgure and settings in ways that were more reductive and graphically powerful. His interest in sexuality and psychology at last came to the fore.... The works are full of the atmosphere that inhabits all the late work of Hopper, a kind of melancholic clarity of thought.” 7

Source: (1) Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper (2) John A. Parks, “Edward Hopper’s Preliminary Drawings.”

The Dories, Ogunquit 1914. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper painted this scene during his ﬁrst summer visit to Ogunquit, Maine. “Knowing of Hopper’s early love of boats, it’s not surprising he chose to paint a picture of dories,” writes art critic Carl Little, “those narrow ﬂatbottomed ﬁshing craft with high sides and sharp prows that one ﬁnds anchored in Maine coves.” In The Dories, Ogunquit, Hopper shows several dories in a deep blue sea surrounded by high coastal outcroppings.

Dos Passos In 2005, The Dories, Ogunquit and three other Maine paintings from 1914 (Cove at Ogunquit; Rocks and House, Ogunquit; Sea at Ogunquit) were exhibited at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in “Edward Hopper: The Ogunquit Paintings.” At the time, arts writer Rose Safran wrote that in “Hopper’s Ogunquit paintings a sense of calm and quiet prevails. It’s the world of an essentially introspective man, and Hopper has been reported to say he painted himself. A meditative mood invades the viewer. The boats are not occupied; the landscape is bare; the Atlantic Ocean barely ripples; vegetation is sparse, and where it adorns a building or the land, it appears unrufﬂed by the winds so prevalent in this area. There is a timeless quality here that would also permeate his later work.” Sources: (1) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England (2) Rose Safran, “Edward Hopper in Maine: An Opportunity to Link Place and Paintings.”

Dos Passos, John (1896–1970) Edward Hopper and John Dos Passos ﬁrst became acquainted in the early 1920s when Dos Passos moved into Hopper’s building at Washington Square North. Both were then showing paintings at the Whitney Studio Club. Although Dos Passos had traveled to Spain to study art and architecture and was committed to art, he never gained recognition as an artist. His fame, of course, came through his writing; before meeting Hopper, he had already published his ﬁrst novel. Both Hopper’s art and the writing of Dos Passos focused on banal aspects of city life: dreary apartments, the streets of New York City, the most unappealing public places. Without embellishing these scenes, both men endowed them with a soul, a sense of mystery, and a sense of unspoken secrets. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Drug Store 1927. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (73.7 ¥ 101.9 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts — Here, Hopper takes one of the

38 city’s commonest sights, a lighted store window, and invests it with a feeling of romance and glamour. Art curator Carol Troyen details his technique: “The streets are dark and unpopulated. Hopper scraped down his pigment on the facades to suggest fading paint and the passage of time, and he used acid tones on the pavement to evoke the wan light cast by the single lamp. But the window of the pharmacy conjures a different mood. The light inside is bright and warm; the red and blue bunting on the display is, if not festive, then at least eyecatching; the jars of red-and-green colored water look like giant, jeweled pendants hanging from gold chains.” The painting comes with a story. The drugstore’s facade advertises PRESCRIPTIONS, DRUGS, and EX-LAX. Hopper ﬁrst titled the painting “EX-LAX” (leading some critics to speculate that, resenting his years in illustration, Hopper poked fun at the vulgar side of advertising). His dealer, Frank K.M. Rehn, did not get the joke. Rehn’s wife pointed out that the title was “indelicate.” With an eye on sales, Hopper changed the title to Drug Store, and even changed the spelling of “ExLax.” Fortunately, when a prominent lawyer purchased the painting and learned of Hopper’s changes, he insisted that “Ex-Lax” be restored. Sources: (1) Carol Troyen, “‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City” (2) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

du Bois, Guy Pène (1884–1958) Pène du Bois was Hopper’s companion from the early days at the New York School of Art. Like Hopper, he studied in Paris and was a member of the Whitney Studio Club, where he had his ﬁrst one-man exhibition in 1918. As editor of the magazine Arts and Decoration he published in 1920 a series of articles on art written by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Pène du Bois believed in Hopper’s talent and supported him relentlessly. In 1924 du Bois served as best man at the wedding of Edward Hopper and Josephine Nivison. Hopper was then already making a

39 name for himself, exhibiting his watercolor and oils and attracting the attention of museums. Du Bois was asked in 1931 to write an essay on Hopper for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s American Artists series (earlier subjects included George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Arthur B. Davies, Robert Henri, George Luks, John Sloan and du Bois himself ). Du Bois wrote this of Hopper: “Life has never changed for him.... He has never stopped ... preferring to portray houses and steam engines to men. He has perhaps erred a little in his terrible desire to simplify ... he told me the other day it had taken him years to bring himself into the painting of a cloud in the sky.... Considerable fear of the ﬂourish is in everything he does; a fear, he might call it, of the ridiculous.” Source: Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper.

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916) “Hopper feels closer to Thomas Eakins than to any other American predecessor,” asserts art critic Alexander Eliot. Thomas Eakins was one of Hopper’s favorite painters, and Hopper would have been ﬂattered by Eliot’s comparison. “One of my paintings was swapped for an Eakins recently,” Hopper once told interviewer Brian O’Doherty, “That’s coming up! [He’s] greater than Manet.” A direct line of descent can be traced from Eakins to Hopper. It began when Eakins, a leading teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, took Thomas Anshutz on in 1876 as his teaching assistant and protégé. When Robert Henri enrolled at the academy, Anshutz became his painting instructor. Later, Henri became Hopper’s teacher at the New York School of Arts. It was Eakins who established realism as a leading American art style, one that would reveal the spirit of American life. In a letter to his father Eakins shared this thought: “The big artist ... keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. He learns what she does with light, the big tool, and then color, then form, and appropriates them to his own use. Then he’s got a canoe of his own, smaller than Nature’s, but big enough for every purpose.”

Early After reading this passage, art critic Carl Little could not “help but think of Hopper and his art, in particular the New England work.” Sources: (1) Alexander Eliot, Three Hundred Years of American Painting (2) Brian O’Doherty, “Portrait: Edward Hopper” (3) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Early Sunday Morning 1930. Oil on canvas, 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Originally named Seventh Avenue Shops, this is Hopper’s most famous cityscape. Early Sunday Morning depicts a two-story block of storefronts with living quarters above. “There are no human ﬁgures,” observes essayist Bruce Ross. “It is morning and a de Chirico–like precisely deﬁned slant of sunlight brightens the sidewalk, the shop fronts, an old fashioned barber shop pole, and the yellow blinds and white curtains covering the windows of the second ﬂoor living quarters, intensifying overall the sense of emptiness and loneliness.” Hopper’s friend and fellow artist Charles Burchﬁeld had this take on the painting: “If we wanted to be brutal about it, we could say that it was merely a collection of horizontal lines, opposed by squares and rectangles, inadequately relieved by a barber pole, a ﬁre-plug and a rufﬂe or two of awning ... this has little to do with the picture’s compelling fascination, its evocation of a mood, its concentration of all quiet Sunday mornings rolled into one.” In her 30-page homage to Early Sunday Morning, art historian Karal Ann Marling asserts that the work “is not a 1920s-style burlesque of Main Street’s fabled backwardness. Nor is it a merciless 1930s-style documentary about commercial stagnation and economic inertia in the Great Depression ... Early Sunday Morning remains engaging, even bafﬂing, insofar as Hopper sidesteps easy answers to the questions his silent street invites.” Sources: (1) Bruce Ross, Venturing Upon Dizzying Height: Lectures and Essays on Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts (2) Charles Burchﬁeld, “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry” (3) Karal Ann Marling, “Early Sunday Morning.”

East

East River 1920–23. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 46 in. (81.3 ¥ 116.8 cm), Private Collection — Of the ﬁve paintings by Hopper showing the East River in New York City, this is the eeriest. Hopper’s view is east to west, toward the Manhattan bank of the river and the setting sun. The palette is experimental: a river of blue-gray to black, with yellow-white highlights, and a sky out of a painting by Turner. The mood is sinister: fuming waters, shadowy buildings and, beyond, an unnatural glow. Over the years, Hopper painted four other East River scenes: Blackwell’s Island (1911 and again in 1928); Queensborough Bridge (1913), and Macomb’s Dam Bridge (1935). The 1928 version of Blackwell’s Island is close in composition to East River, but opposite in mood: the sun bright, the water calm, the shoreline and buildings clearly delineated. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

East Side Interior 1922. Etching on copper. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts—When East Side Interior appeared in the Chicago Society of Etchers annual exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, it was awarded the Logan Prize. More importantly, it became the ﬁrst work by Hopper to enter the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The etching shows a woman seated at a sewing machine, lost in thought, gazing out the window. The room is dark, claustrophobic. Hopper painted another version of this subject in 1921, an oil titled Girl at a Sewing Machine, in which Hopper shows a woman looking down at her sewing, rather than out the window. Both works recall John Sloan’s subjects of urban women as homemakers or workers in sweatshops at the turn of the century. Hopper’s interest in this subject may have a historical basis. Humanities professor Walter Wells see a possible connection to the Triangle Shirtwaist Company ﬁre in 1911, when 146

40 seamstresses died, either behind locked doors or leaping from upper-story windows. The factory was located across the park from Hopper’s Washington Square North apartment. Source: Walter Wells, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper.

East Wind Over Weehawken 1934. Oil on canvas, 34 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (86.4 ¥ 127.6 cm), Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — Despite the raw weather of March 1934, Hopper rode the ferry several times across the Hudson River to sketch a scene in Weehawken, New Jersey. He made eight sketches before completing the painting in his Washington Square North studio. His ﬁnal composition features a horizontal sweep across the canvas (a wedge of houses lined up along the street) interrupted by strong verticals (lampposts, a dead tree, a telephone pole). The colors are of a winter palette: a pale sky, and buildings rendered in deep blues, greens and grays, and in muted yellows and rusts. In the winter of 1934, when East Wind Over Weehawken was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a columnist for Time magazine took objection to the painting (Time was then violently opposed to President Roosevelt and the New Deal), listing Hopper as one of the artists “concerned with such Americana as lynching, unemployment, militarism, middle-class stupidity, lower-class squalor. Dozens of able artists have in 1934 found bread lines and burlesque shows more interesting than bunches of zinnias in a pewter vase.” Like the Time columnist in 1934, there are those who continue to see East Wind Over Weehawken as a “message painting.” In 1987 Robert Hobbs pointed to the “unmowed lawns, the desolate houses, the For Sale sign, and the dark ﬁgures in the background” as “clues to the effects of the Depression, which this painting documents.” This is a stretch. It’s more likely that East Wind Over Weehawken deals with architecture, weather, and the time of year, not with the effects of the Great Depression. Darkened walls, empty streets, streaks of

41 clouds denote late winter. Hopper used the long grass to show the direction of the wind (the worst of winter storms visit the New York City area on east winds). Hopper did not believe in mixing politics and art, and even avoided discussing politics with close friends. He was politically conservative, and an unbending individualist. Time missed the mark. Edward and Jo Hopper had little compassion for the underclass; they were ﬁercely opposed to “pump priming” (the New Deal’s stimulus plan) and to federal subsidies for the unemployed and homeless. Sources: (1) “Art: Whitney Thermometer,” Time (2) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper.

Eastern Point Light 1923. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection — Hopper and Jo Nivison explored Eastern Point and the surrounding area during their ﬁrst summer painting excursions in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was Jo who suggested that Hopper put aside his oils and paint in watercolor. He had used the medium in his work as an illustrator; now, as his companionship with Jo deepened into romance, he decided to follow her advice. It was a move that turned his career around. Eastern Point Light was Hopper’s ﬁrst watercolor that summer. Curator Carol Troyen comments on its shortcomings: “In this ﬂedgling effort, Hopper maintained reasonable control over the independent-minded wash but had a little difﬁculty creating a legible transition between the grassy dunes in the foreground and the buildings resting on them.” Troyen also notes Hopper’s awkward treatment of the sky, “leaving halos of reserved paper around the low clouds, which cause them to project improbably.” Curator Virginia Mecklenburg was more forgiving, writing that Hopper “found a way to transform a beautiful shape into a symbolic motif ” and that, in a “semi-translucent landscape of this isolated outcrop at the tip of Eastern Point, Hopper linked man and sea.” Sources: (1) Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Glouces-

Edward ter” (2) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Edward Hopper House Art Center Located at 82 North Broadway, Nyack, New York, this two-story clapboard house was Edward Hopper’s boyhood home. From his upstairs bedroom window, he had a clear view of the nearby Hudson River and the opposite shoreline. When the house was built in 1858 (by Hopper’s maternal grandfather), the rooms were all to the left of the doorway. Additional living space was added at the right in 1882, the year of Hopper’s birth. Hopper lived there until he took up permanent residence in New York City in his late twenties; his sister, Marion, who never married, remained in the Nyack home until her death in 1965. Even before Marion Hopper’s death, the house had fallen into disrepair. By 1970 it stood vacant and dilapidated, boarded up and scheduled for demolition. A group of Nyack citizens banded together to form the Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation in 1971. In 2000, the United States Department of the Interior added the house to its National Register of Historic Places. Today, Edward Hopper House Art Center (www.hopperhouse.org) is an artist exhibition space and community cultural center. It stages exhibits of regional and national artists, both juried and invitational. Each summer Hopper House offers a series of outdoor jazz concerts featuring world-renowned musicians. The center also holds weekly ﬁgure drawing sessions, monthly songwriting and poetry workshops and numerous other programs and events for adults and children of all ages. In 2009 the Hopper Room was created to house a permanent exhibit of photographs of Edward Hopper throughout his life, as well as memorabilia, including his paintbrush and boyhood bicycle. Books about Hopper and reproductions of his artworks are available for purchase. The Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., a longtime friend of the Hopper family, once observed “Hopper House is not only a loving

Eight memorial to a great artist, but a vibrant symbol of local recognition and commitment to preservation of cultural values.” Source: Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., “Edward Hopper: His Rockland Heritage and Legacy”

The Eight This designation was attached to a group of American artists who challenged conservative academic art in America, objecting to its exclusiveness, its sense of privilege, and its rules and regulations. The Eight included founder Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson and Arthur B. Davies. Although they are now considered pillars of American art, in 1908 they were labeled a “revolutionary black gang.” They exhibited only once, in 1908, in a show titled “The Eight” at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. These painters and their movement would later become associated with the Ashcan School, an originally derisive moniker leveled at those who painted the shabby neighborhoods and grimy lives of the lower classes. Because he was a student of Robert Henri and rubbed elbows with the others, Hopper is sometimes linked to The Eight, but he was, at most, positioned at the movement’s outer edge. At all times, Hopper considered himself a one-man movement. Source: Bennard B. Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight

The El Station 1908. Oil on canvas, 20 ¥ 29 in. (50.8 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper had been to Paris, France, in 1906–07, and had painted in the soft sunlight. The El Station shows the inﬂuence of French impressionism, especially in the rapid brushwork that brings about a blurring of architectural detail and the soft sunlight on the adjacent building. New York, however, was not Paris. Lower Manhattan was different, its streets and rail stations grimier, its sun often more glaring. The dark palette Hopper used to ren-

42 der the station and rail tracks foretells the direction of Hopper’s later work. Hopper once remarked that The El Station was “improvised” from his remembrance of New York City’s Ninth Avenue elevated station at Christopher Street. He features the station and, at the rear right, a large building with three chimneys. Deep shadow, created by sunlight streaming in from the right, envelops two ﬁgures waiting on the station platform. Curator Maura Heffner comments on Hopper’s “strong sense of composition ... and his de-emphasis of the human presence.” She notes that “Hopper places his main emphasis on the components of the station, such as the angularity of its buildings and the span of the train track. The light gets brighter from one side of the work to the other, accentuating a lateral sense of movement across the train track while emphasizing its emptiness. The waiting passengers on the platform, however, are auxiliary elements in the scene — seemingly included to accentuate the longing for a train that has not yet arrived.” Source: Maura Heffner, Edward Hopper and Urban Realism.

Eleven A.M. 1926. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 361 ⁄ 8 in. (71.3 ¥ 91.6 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.—The woman central to this scene is seated and leaning forward in a chair, her arms on her knees, staring out an apartment window. The curtains hang limp, and despite the sunlight and open window everything seems cool and still. Writing of this painting in the New York Post in 1927, art critic Margaret Breuning praised Hopper’s “uncompromising ﬁdelity to reality” and his use of color, his “grays that are mauve and violet and blue and an answering gamut of reds and rose and deep wine color and purple.... It is realism and it is creative imagination fusing in a rewarding ensemble.” The woman is naked except for her shoes. The time of day suggests her reluctance to get dressed and to begin the day. In her solitude,

43 in the midst of the city’s noise and energy, she’s not so much lonely as simply alone. Her long dark hair covers not only her face, but obscures her identity and personality. This anonymity recalls the nude ﬁgure in Hopper’s 1921 etching, Evening Wind. Source: Margaret Breuning, “Many New Exhibitions.”

Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith Hopper the Artist’s Mother* 1915–16. Oil on canvas, 38 ¥ 32 in. (96 ¥ 81.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — In this portrait, Hopper captures his mother’s strong-mindedness and severe demeanor. Seated in a straight-back chair, she looks out directly at the viewer, one eyebrow raised. Her resemblance to her son is strong; she has the same heavy-lidded blue eyes and full lips. The viewer’s eye is drawn to her hands, arthritic, resting in her lap. She is a widow in her early sixties, and yet she seems older, and more than a bit worn out. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–82) It was under the guidance and example of his father, Garret Hopper, that Edward in his youth came upon Emerson’s “Art” and “SelfReliance” essays. Hopper’s adult values, artistic as well as personal, incorporate Emerson’s guidelines. In “Art,” Emerson called for American painters to free themselves from past art, and to paint what they saw around them: “the ﬁeld and road-side ... the shop and mill ... the railroad ... the insurance ofﬁce,” and even the effect of the “mercenary impulses” on these subjects. Emerson wrote: “The artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.... No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country ... he cannot wipe out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it grew.... The virtue of art lies in detachment ... and to magnify by detaching ...

Etching depends on the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates.” Emerson prefaced his essay on “SelfReliance” with these lines written by Beaumont and Fletcher: “Man is his own star; and the soul that can / render an honest and a perfect man, / Commands all light, all inﬂuence, all fate.” Emerson went on: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which ﬂashes across his mind from within.... There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse.... Trust thyself: every heart vibrates into that vibrant string.... Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.... No man can violate his nature.... The essence of genius ... [is] spontaneity or instinct.... Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.” Hopper famously observed, “The man’s the work. Something doesn’t come out of nothing.” Curator Pamela Koob asserts that this idea is grounded in Emersonian thought: “Hopper’s statements on painting reﬂected ... a lasting enthusiasm for Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose philosophical works Hopper said he read ‘over and over.’” Sources: (1) Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance, and Other Essays (2) Pamela N. Koob, “States of Being: Edward Hopper and Symbolist Aesthetics”

etching Hopper took up etching in 1915 while working as an illustrator in New York City, teaching himself a new skill under the guidance of fellow artist/illustrator Martin Lewis. Over the next dozen years, he worked on close to seventy etchings and drypoints. “His early etchings,” notes British Museum curator Stephen Coppel, “were executed directly onto the copper plate; preparatory sketches exist for his later prints. His etchings went through many changes of state as minor adjustments were made to the plate. With one exception, he printed all his own plates using an old

Evans money-printing press. He did not number the impressions of his editions, which were limited to about a hundred, but usually pulled proofs when required.” In 1917 George Bellows invited Hopper to exhibit prints in the First Annual Exhibition of the Painter-Gravers of America. Hopper submitted a portrait of Walter Tittle at his easel and two French scenes, Les Poilus and Evening, the Seine. He continued to show his etchings, and by the early 1920s his prints were receiving favorable criticism and winning awards. Carl Zigrosser, one of the ﬁrst to help Hopper promote his prints, described Hopper’s etchings as “dramas of the human predicament, often lonely or tragic in their implication. The best of them capture ... the ﬂeeting, utterly private moment, the very intimacy of the soul.... There are in American Landscape, Evening Wind, House Tops, Night Shadows, East Side Interior, and The Lonely House a hushed silence, a breathless stillness so insistent as almost to reach the choking point.” Despite his successes in etching, painting remained Hopper’s ﬁrst love. In 1923 he traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he threw himself into painting in watercolor. Because of his success in that medium, and later in oils, he never again returned to etching. Nonetheless, Hopper’s years as an etcher had turned him around, a fact noted by Germain Viatte in the catalog for the 1989 Edward Hopper exhibition at the Musée Cantini in Marseilles, France: “The practice of etching ... permitted Hopper to free himself both from his French themes and from the literal narration required of the illustrator. He admired the work of Rembrandt, Goya, and Méryon and was no doubt inﬂuenced by the prints of John Sloan, with whose urban themes and compassionate depiction of the middle-class’s everyday universe he felt a kinship. What characterized Hopper from the outset, however, was his ability to describe, without the sentimentality of Sloan’s anecdotes, the universe of solitude and expectation.” Sources: (1) Stephen Coppel, American Prints:

44 From Hopper to Pollock (2) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper” (3) Germain Viatte, “Commentary on the Works.”

Evans, Walker (1903–75) “Of all American artists, Walker Evans is the nearest in style and temperament to Hopper,” writes art historian Ian Jeffrey. Like Hopper, Evans was captivated by the landscape and architecture of New England. Their mediums differed — Evans was a photographer — but their temperaments and approach dovetailed. “Each worked,” Jeffrey notes, “with a restrictive, even reductive, medium: Evans with monochrome photography, and Hopper with a simpliﬁed, planar style, using few colors.” A quietness, a silence, pervades Hopper’s paintings and Evans’ photographs. Hopper’s “pictures of houses and urban scenes,” writes English professor J.A. Ward, “sharply suggest those of Evans. Like Evans, Hopper is an artist who forcefully isolates ... the contemporary American scene from the almost unavoidable suggestions of sounds, social energies, and temporal processes.” In 1933 their paths crossed at the Museum of Modern Art. Alongside Hopper’s ﬁrst retrospective was an exhibit devoted to Evans, “Photographs of Nineteenth-Century American Houses.” The juxtaposition of these two shows,” curator Carol Troyen notes, “revealed unexpected connections between the painter and the photographer; their subject matter; their straightforward, unembellished approaches; and their dedication to revealing the quiet resonant nature of the tokens of the familiar past — their sensitivity to what social critic Lewis Mumford called ‘the sacredness of everyday fact.’” Sources: (1) Ian Jeffrey, “A Painter’s Strategies” (2) J.A. Ward, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (3) Carol Troyen, “‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City.”

Evening Wind 1921. Etching on copper. Platemark: 67 ⁄ 8 ¥ 8 ⁄ 8 in. (17.5 ¥ 21 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, 3

45 Boston, Massachusetts—Hopper shows a nude woman on a bed in a half-kneeling pose, her head turned toward a window, where a soft breeze moves a curtain in her direction. To show the whiteness of the window, curtains, and bedding, and highlights on the woman’s skin, Hopper left areas of his etching plate uninked. To bring about the image’s dark areas, the wall in shadow at the left, bedding piled at the foot of the bed, the window frame, he used a dense crosshatching. The etching went through eight states (changes in the plate) before it met his standards. Art historian Avis Berman provides this description: “a soft, curvaceous nude climbs into bed. Her hair sensually falls forward, hiding her face as she turns to catch the breeze from an open window. The etcher seems to be sitting directly across from her on the other side of the bed, expressing his dreams by scratching this lovely chiaroscuro moment into a metal plate.” In 1938 Hopper sold prints of Evening Wind to Frederick Keppel & Co., a New York City art dealer, for $25.50 each, the price he was then asking for many of his etchings. In 2008 a print of Evening Wind, “a warm, rich impression with carefully wiped tone” with the penciled inscription “to Miss Mary Ellison compliments of Edward Hopper,” sold at Christie’s in London for $141,810. Source: Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York.

Excursion into Philosophy 1959. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), Private Collection — Everything in this barren room is hard edged, rectangular, even the shoulders of a fully dressed man sitting at the edge of a bed. Entering through a window at the upper right, sunlight forms rectangular patches on the ﬂoor and the wall, and envelops the man and his companion, a woman lying on the bed behind him, her face to the wall. This light does nothing to warm Hopper’s palette of muted blues, browns and greys. We are left with a scene that is unremittingly cold. The painting begs an explanation. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd sees a man “seem-

Figures ingly dejected and lost in thought, while a woman lies upon the bed with her pink dress pulled up to expose her bare buttocks.” The man’s furrowed brow, vacant stare and lifeless body speak volumes. Yet we can only guess how long he’s been reading the book that now lies open beside him. And there’s no way to tell whether the woman is sleeping or awake. What we do know is that in 1959 Hopper was 77 years old, in ill health, and producing but one painting each year. Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

ﬁgures As an illustrator for two decades (1906– 25) of the covers and pages of magazines and business publications, Hopper produced very competent drawings of the human ﬁgure. In his July 1918 Dry Dock Dial cover, a dozen men are at work in a shipyard; the April 1923 Tavern Topics cover features passengers on a double-decker Manhattan bus and a crowded street scene; the August 1925 Hotel Management cover shows two dozen people enjoying a day at the beach. In the hundreds of drawings included in Edward Hopper as Illustrator, only three percent fail to include a human ﬁgure. Hopper was embarrassed, however, by his twenty years in illustration, and acted as if they had never occurred. He yearned to be a ﬁne artist, and after his breakthrough into watercolor in 1923 and his sell-out show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in the fall of 1924, he put illustration (and the true-to-life drawing of human ﬁgures) behind him. “Hopper often put only one person in a painting,” writes art historian Matthew Baigell. “If there are more, they usually do not interact with each other. As a rule they are immobile and they stare, they lack self-assurance and selfidentity ... they appear depressed and look as if something horrible has happened to them, as if in some way their humanity has been stripped away. The nudes do not seem to know what to make of their nudity.”

Film Baigell ﬁnds it interesting that “Hopper often provided his buildings with greater individuality than his people. They stand isolated, free and unbound, whereas people are invariably surrounded by interior and exterior walls ... Hopper’s ﬁgures appear to be incidental shapes in an otherwise well-ordered composition.... They are inextricably part of a two-dimensional design, physically and psychologically incapable of movement.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper as Illustrator (2) Matthew Baigell, “The Silent Witness of Edward Hopper.”

ﬁlm noir Edward and Jo Hopper frequented New York City movie houses in the 1940s and 1950s, when ﬁlm noir (literally “black ﬁlm”) was at its height. Film noir was rooted in the German Expressionism of the 1920s and 1930s, when directors were noted for their stark camera angles and movements, chiaroscuro lighting, and shadowy, high-contrast images (elements Hopper employed, especially after he turned to etching in 1915). Film noir also derived from the plots and themes of American literary works, such as the hard-boiled pulp novels and crime ﬁction turned out by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. We know that Hopper was caught up in ﬁlm noir, and that he purchased tickets to Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Notorious (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), The Third Man (1949), Les Diaboliques (1955) and—at the tail end of the ﬁlm noir era—Psycho (1960). Critics compare Hopper’s cityscapes to ﬁlm noir, both in settings (eateries, ofﬁces, hotel rooms and lobbies, empty streets) and in mood (melancholy, alienation, loneliness, ambiguity, desperation). The Hopper/ﬁlm noir link became ﬁxed in everyone’s mind with the ﬁlm Psycho, in which Alfred Hitchcock used Hopper’s House by the Railroad as the model for the huge, creepy house rising above the Bates Motel.

46 Source: Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir Reader.

First Row Orchestra 1951. Oil on canvas, 311 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (79 ¥ 101.9 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.—In First Row Orchestra the setting is plush: a heavy gray curtain fringed in gold, and upholstered seats trimmed in rich dark wood. Using the long sweep of the proscenium and stage front, Hopper draws the viewer’s eye to two ﬁgures in the front row. The woman has yet to remove her expensive fur coat; her pulled-back hair is as severe as the expression on her face. Her escort, elegant in tuxedo, has swung around in his seat to join her in examining the playbill. Even though they touch, their body language suggests an emotional distance. “The Hoppers were avid fans of the theater throughout their lives,” writes art historian Ita Berkow. “When he used the theater as subject matter for his paintings, Hopper chose to focus on the time before a performance when the audience begins to assemble. The welldressed couple in First Row Orchestra represents the types of people he enjoyed observing. Perhaps their quiet solitude and lack of interaction appeal to Hopper, who was himself, primarily a loner.” Source: Ita G. Berkow, Edward Hopper: An American Master.

Five A.M. 1937. Oil on canvas, 25 ¥ 36 in. (63.5 ¥ 91.4 cm), Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas— Unlike the majestic tower Hopper had featured six years earlier in The Lighthouse at Two Lights, the lighthouse pictured in Five A.M. plays second ﬁddle to an onshore industrial complex and its smokestack. It seems little more than a buoy. The Wichita Art Museum notes that Hopper composed the painting “from his memory of ferry boat rides taken from Long Island Sound up to Boston and back to Manhattan, synthesizing details of lighthouse, factory, and coastal landscape so as to awaken the viewer’s

47 own primal memory of similar experience. Hopper realized the surface of the sea ... with slow, studied strokes of opaque paint, a technique that suggested heavily moving, truculent matter rather than free ﬂowing liquid ... Hopper reserved his most tender touch for the least aesthetic detail, the red brick factory buildings and smoke towers, upon which he carefully, sweetly, played notes of rose and gold-toned dawn.” Source: Wichita Art Museum, “Search the Museum Collection.”

Flexner, James Thomas (1908–2003) Flexner stands out among other critics of Hopper’s art in that he became an intimate friend of Edward Hopper, a relationship that began when Hopper read the following in Flexner’s The Pocket History of American Painting (1950): “Edward Hopper ... thinks technical experimentation an empty exercise unless it grows from an artist’s urgent need to transcribe his ‘most intimate impressions of nature.’ However, he has not worked in a traditional manner. Unlike his fellow student Bellows, he could not make the methods they had both learned from Henri express his own emotions. While Bellows turned out a ﬂood of art, Hopper engaged in a lonely search to ﬁnd himself. As impervious to outside inﬂuence as was Winslow Homer, he adopted no ready-made recipes, either French or American. His technique and his vision matured together with the slow certainty of organic growth ... Hopper had discarded Henri’s romantic outlook and dramatic brushwork for a ﬁrm, laconic realism. He depicts American cities with love, and yet with unﬂinching exactitude: the garish stores, the jumble of architectural styles, the contrast of brightness and shadow on blank or overdecorated walls. When he shows people — diners at an all-night restaurant ... [or] a woman undressing under the glare of an unshaded bulb—we see them in a ﬂash, as if we had gone quickly by a lighted window. The pictures are alive with the mystery and loneliness of a great city. In landscapes as in urban scenes, Hopper gains solidity from geometric com-

Folly positions similar to those Sheeler borrowed from cubism, but he denies any borrowing: ‘Angularity just comes naturally to me.’ Living in the same age, he had reached some of the same conclusions as the Parisian masters. Like theirs, his art is moving and forceful because it evolved from his own temperament and his own experience.” Upon reading and enjoying this lavish praise, Hopper asked his wife Jo to call Flexner and invite him to their apartment. Flexner relates the experience of his ﬁrst and subsequent visits: “My generalized memory of my ﬁfteen-year friendship with Hopper is of sitting with him in silence, either total or stretching between us under the perpetual chatter of his wife, Jo. He communicated, so it seemed to me, affection, intuitive understanding, and sympathy. My own naturally ebullient nature — no one had ever accused me of being taciturn — was led by the force of his personality to welcome, warmly and contentedly, this wordless communication. Having lived all my life in an environment of talk, where custom requires speech even if there is nothing to say, I have never with any other human being even approached such a relationship as I had with Hopper.” Source: James Flexner, Random Harvest.

Folly Beach 1929. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.2 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Folly Beach is located on Folly Island, just outside of Charleston Harbor. As a Civil War buff, Hopper would have realized he was near the spot where the war began with the ﬁring on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. In 1863 the Union Army seized Folly Island, and held it to the war’s end, making it a staging ground for the siege of Charleston. Folly Beach was one of eleven watercolors ﬁnished by Hopper during his 1929 visit to Charleston. “Of all Hopper’s watercolors, this work comes closest to Winslow Homer,” notes curator Virginia Mecklenburg. Hopper shows palm trees (including one dead tree with spreading arms) towering over a deserted

Force beach. “The lavender and blue shadows in the foreground and the vivid palette,” Mecklenburg states, “give the work the feel, if not the actual look, of Homer’s work.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Force, Juliana (1876–1948) Force’s biographer, Avis Berman, describes her as a mercurial compound of brains, frivolity, and rebelliousness. Force started off in 1907 as the secretary and personal assistant to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Immersing herself in the world of New York City art, Force emerged as the ﬁrst director of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1931– 47). She encouraged and supported a variety of known and unknown artists, buying the work of those she believed in. Like Hopper (whom she encouraged at the Whitney Studio Club in 1920, when he needed it the most), she had little use for what was fashionable in art, and in one speech expressed her credo: “Think for Yourself.... Do not read too much criticism on art. At the beginning it is apt to paralyze thought.... Buy pictures, not names. The last thing to interest you in a work of art is the name of the artist. Pictures should be seen, not heard!” Force championed her band of artists, encouraging them, entertaining them, feeding them, ﬁnding them studios, commissions and grants, and inviting them into exhibitions, In 1949 Hermon More, director of the Whitney, and Lloyd Goodrich, who would succeed him, commended Juliana Force for her “sensibility, her instinct for quality, her innate sense of style and her remarkable ability to absorb new ideas ... her reactions to art were never reasoned or intellectualized or out of books; they were intuitive ... she had an unerring sense of quality.” No one beneﬁted more from these qualities than Edward Hopper (although he was not one to pour out his thanks). Force liked to tell a story about one of her festive art opening parties. She had come in a little late, just in time to ﬁnd Hop-

48 per going out the door. “Leaving so soon, Mr. Hopper?” Juliana inquired. “Yes,” rumbled the deep, solemn voice. “No life there.” Sources: (1) Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2) Whitney Museum of Art, Juliana Force and American Art: A Memorial Exhibition, September 24 –October 30, 1949.

Four Lane Road 1956. Oil on canvas, 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 411 ⁄ 2 in. (69.9 ¥ 105.4 cm), Private Collection—The gas station owner in this scene is seated, taking in the sun, knowing he will have little or no business (perhaps a superhighway has opened nearby, diverting his would-be customers). He seems intent on ignoring the woman leaning out the window behind him, who calls for his attention. Robert Hughes notes that Edward and Jo Hopper “fought incessantly for more than thirty years,” and that “a sign of this creeps into ... Four Lane Road.” He may be right. The painting is like a split screen: at the left, a calm and serene open road and wooded area; at the right, a hard-faced man and an insistent woman. Source: Robert Hughes, American Visions.

Freight Cars, Gloucester 1928. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 401 ⁄ 2 in. (73.7 ¥ 101.9 cm), Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts — Curator Carol Troyen describes Freight Cars, Gloucester as “sober, muscular, and — despite its descriptive credibility—abstract.” Hopper places two rust-red boxcars on rail sidings, where they obstruct our view of all but the tops of buildings and the steeple of a church. These elements become a geometric design, “a succession of rectangles, triangles,” Troyen observes, “and a march of vertical shapes ... church spire, telegraph pole, and chimneys ... simultaneously compress the space and pull the eye into it.” At some point during that summer, Hopper worked on a watercolor, Railroad Gates, at the same location. In this painting there are no boxcars; from a somewhat longer perspective we see the entirety of the buildings, the

49 telegraph poles, and a black and white railwaycrossing gate. Painted in softer tones, Railroad Gates appears more picturesque and far less abstract than Freight Cars, Gloucester. Freight Cars, Gloucester was one of a dozen Hopper paintings exhibited at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1929. The other eleven were From Williamsburg Bridge, Blackwell’s Island, Captain Ed Staples (1928), Drug Store, Captain Upton’s House, Lighthouse Hill, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Hodgkin’s House, Cape Ann Granite (1928) and Night Windows. Critics thought little of Hopper’s brand of realism, judging it out-of-date, both in style and subject matter. And yet, Freight Cars, Gloucester invited critics to notice Hopper’s exploration of abstract art. Source: Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Gloucester.”

French Six-Day Rider 1937. Oil on canvas, 171 ⁄4 ¥ 191 ⁄4 in. (43.8 ¥ 48.9 cm), Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth — In November 1936 Hopper frequented the International Six-Day Bicycle Race held at New York City’s old Madison Square Garden, where the spectacle had been staged since the 1890s. Originally, single racers rode continuously around a cinder track for six days or until fatigue overtook them. In 1899 the single-rider competition was banned for humanitarian reasons but continued with two-man teams racing around the clock for six days. From the start, Hopper knew that he wanted to paint the event, and he began to the work in March. The racer in the red jersey is very likely Frenchman Alfred Letourner, one of the era’s great six-day champions. He customarily wore a vivid red jersey, earning the nickname “Le Diable Rouge.” And, as Hopper guessed, he was the last Frenchman to win at Madison Square Garden. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

From Williamsburg Bridge 1928. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New

Frost York — Hopper shows the upper ﬂoors of apartment buildings as seen from one of the East River bridges connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn. A new day has broken, quiet and still. In the distance, a woman sits in an apartment window, taking in the view. A bridge railing at the bottom of the canvas evokes a sense of motion, so that the scene almost feels like a snapshot taken from a moving car. Hopper’s approach was methodical. From the pedestrian walkway of the bridge, he made a detailed preliminary drawing in conté crayon before ﬁnishing the painting in his Washington Square North studio. Both the sketch and the ﬁnal work contain two compositional elements that repeat in other works by Hopper — strong diagonals and buildings that are cropped. One critic scoffed at Hopper’s choice of subject, “old time New York dwelling houses.” In fact, Hopper was fascinated with classic brownstones; he would feature them two years later in Early Sunday Morning, again in 1932 in Room in Brooklyn, and once more in 1956 in Sunlight on Brownstones. Hopper’s paintings in these years represent a break from his earlier work. They are more ordered in design, utilizing simpliﬁed planes and broad blocks of color. Figures rarely appear, and when they do they are isolated and anonymous, like the lone woman in the window we see in From Williamsburg Bridge. Source: Carol Troyen, “‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City.”

Frost, Robert (1874–1963) In 1955, after Hopper was awarded the gold medal for painting at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he met Frost at the reception. Frost told Hopper that he was the one man there that night that he most wanted to meet, and suggested that he’d like to visit Hopper’s New York City studio to continue their discussion. (That meeting never came off.) In 1960 the New York Times art critic Stuart Preston compared Hopper to Frost: “Without indulging in any emotional histrionics, he

Gas has gently exposed the pangs and pities and occasional awards, of daily existence in this country. More than any other artist he has exposed the nerve of personal loneliness that beats so strongly under all the show of materialistic plenty and ‘togetherness.’” When Brian O’Doherty came to interview Hopper in South Truro in September 1962, he saw Sun in an Empty Room, almost completed, sitting on the easel. To O’Doherty the painting “seemed a deserted mirror of the room we sat in, strangely emptied by the suspenseful light. Through the window in the painting the woods were livid and mysterious.” O’Doherty was moved to quote Robert Frost’s line, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Hopper replied, “I admire Frost.” Sources: (1) Stuart Preston, “Art: Award to Hopper; Quarterly Honors Dean of U.S. Realist Painting” (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Gas 1940. Oil on canvas, 261 ⁄4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (66.7 ¥ 102.2 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York — Here we see a lone attendant alongside three gasoline pumps. It is dusk; there is no trafﬁc or other activity. The viewer’s eye is drawn by linear perspective to the darkness at the end of the road and into the woods beyond. Why is the attendant standing at the pump? Has he glimpsed a car down the road? In dress more suited for an urban setting, he seems oddly out of place. This is, for the most part, a studio painting. “Nearly all the oils from Hopper’s later years,” writes poet and art critic Carl Little, “are composites. Thus, the pumps in Gas, 1940, are based on studies of the real thing, but the ﬁlling station itself is an invention — made up, Hopper told Goodrich, ‘out of parts of several.’ No matter that the station is lit up like day, that the attendant is dressed neatly in tie and vest: the blood-red pumps and the looming wall of dark trees intimate if not death then at the very least the fear of a traveler on a lonely Cape Cod road.” The Museum of Modern Art, upon purchas-

50 ing Gas in 1943, provided this description: “Mr. Hopper is usually considered one of the greatest living realists. But behind the commonplace reality that his pictures present with such factual objectivity one can feel an underlying spirit of romantic mystery. This is particularly true of his recent work, of which ‘Gas’ is one of the most original and memorable examples. This is at ﬁrst glance a picture of a routine moment in a routine American job.... But the longer you look at it, the more haunting the scene becomes: the lonely road in the cool dusk with the man tending the gasoline pumps, like an attentive priest before three scarlet idols.” Source: Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Girl at a Sewing Machine 1921. Oil on canvas, 19 ¥ 18 in. (48.3 ¥ 45.7 cm), The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain — Here we see the simplicity and austerity that would become hallmarks of Hopper’s mature style. A young woman in a white slip, her face lost in long dark hair, works at her sewing machine. Hopper places the painting’s other elements — a mirrored dresser and a small artwork on the wall — in shadow; a warm sunlight falls only on the sewing machine, on the woman and, behind her, on the wall of the room. Some art scholars theorize that this painting owes a debt to Jan Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (1671); Elliot Bostwick Davis suggests that Hopper may have seen the Vermeer at the Louvre during one of his trips to Paris, France. This was Hopper’s second treatment of the subject. In East Side Interior, a 1922 etching, he shows a woman looking up from her sew ing. Sitting in dark shadows, she stares out the window. In that etching, and in Girl at a Sewing Machine, Hopper may have been recalling the 1911 tragedy at Washington Place and Greene Street, when the Triangle Shirtwaist Company went up in ﬂames and 146 young working women had died. Source: Elliot Bostwick Davis, “Hopper’s Foundation.”

51

Girlie Show 1941. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 38 in. (81.3 ¥ 96.5 cm), Private Collection — This painting is the only Hopper work to depict a live stage performance. His approach, as usual, was methodical, but also a bit of a risk. He went to New York City’s Minsky Theater to make sketches of the architecture, orchestra pit, strippers and patrons, at a time when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was leading a relentless crackdown on burlesque and strip shows. Girlie Show presents a redhead nearing the end of her act, spotlighted before a male audience. She wears heavy makeup, high-heeled blue shoes, a g-string — and nothing else. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd senses that the stripper—modeled by Jo Hopper, then in her late ﬁfties — is asserting her “control over the audience by displaying her naked body, thus threatening patriarchal authority. She appears powerful as she self-conﬁdently struts across the stage.... Her muscular calves, arms, thighs, and buttocks convey strength, as do her conﬁdent posture and facial expression.” Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe

Gloucester Harbor, 1912. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — On his ﬁrst painting trip to the New England coast, Hopper spent the summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, often working alongside Leon Kroll, who had also studied under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. Elements of French impressionism— separate dabs of paint, soft pastels, absence of outlining and detail—run throughout Gloucester Harbor, and are also evident in the small yellow house with green shutters in the foreground, in the white sails in the middle ground, and in the houses dotted in the background. Gloucester Harbor is an early example of Hopper’s quest to use light for its dramatic effect. “In its light and composition,” observes art critic Carl Little, “Gloucester Harbor recalls any number of impressionist views of Brittany.”

Gloucester In 1926 Hopper painted a watercolor with the same title, Gloucester Harbor. The two paintings are unalike. The earlier impressionist touches are gone, replaced by a crisply detailed landscape of the harbor and a spit of land beyond and, in the foreground, a rocky shore. The 1912 oil is indistinct, a glimpse of the harbor, whereas the 1926 watercolor is rendered in far greater detail. “It took me ten years to get over Europe,” Hopper later admitted. Source: Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Gloucester Mansion 1924. Watercolor on paper, 133 ⁄ 8 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (34 ¥ 49.6 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts—Most of Hopper’s watercolors have strictly descriptive titles. The title Gloucester Mansion, however, can be seen as gently mocking, the product of a deadpan sense of humor. What we see is worn and fading clapboard siding, windows with broken or missing panes, a ﬁshing dory sitting on the grass in the backyard. Indeed, how can this house be called a mansion? And yet, lit by the sun and looking down toward the harbor, the house stands proud. It might be argued that Hopper, by deciding to paint this house, was honoring the values of Ashcan School artists who had depicted hardworking immigrants in the streets of lower Manhattan. Sicilian immigrants in Gloucester, Massachusetts, lived at the town’s west end, in a small peninsula known as The Fort, often with several families sharing one run-down dwelling. It took years of backbreaking labor before a Sicilian ﬁsherman was able to save enough to build a home for his family. To every ﬁsherman and his family, a private home was a mansion. Gloucester Mansion was included in Hopper’s 1924 exhibition at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, and was purchased by John T. Spaulding, a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Spaulding went on to become one of Hopper’s important patrons. Sources: (1) Gail Levin, The Complete Watercolors

Gloucester of Edward Hopper (2) Mark Kurlansky, The Last Fish Tale.

Gloucester, Massachusetts When Hopper arrived for his second summer visit to Gloucester in 1923 he was still earning a living as a commercial illustrator. It was in Gloucester that he found both a wife and his footing as a ﬁne artist. Gloucester, with its picturesque harbor, intense sunlight, and relative proximity to New York City, had become a thriving artists’ colony. Ashcan School artists Robert Henri, John Sloan and William Glackens spent their summers painting there. Hopper ﬁrst visited this quaint Cape Ann town in the summer of 1912, when he resumed a friendship with Leon Kroll, begun when both were students under Henri. Hopper and Kroll painted out-of-doors in oil, ﬁnding their subjects at the boat-ﬁlled harbor and in Gloucester’s neighborhoods and outlying areas. That summer Hopper ﬁnished ﬁve paintings: Gloucester Harbor; Briar Neck, Gloucester; Tall Masts; Squam Light; Italian Quarter, Gloucester. When Hopper arrived in Gloucester eleven years later, in 1923, he found it crowded with artists he knew: Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Theresa Bernstein, William Meyerowitz, and Josephine Nivison. Hopper and Nivison hit it off. They quickly became a couple, going off to picnic and paint together. Jo, experienced in watercolor, convinced Edward to work in that medium instead of in oils. Hopper’s ﬁrst watercolor was Eastern Point Light, a subject painted previously by Winslow Homer. That summer, with Jo as his muse, Hopper completed seventeen watercolors, including Dead Trees; Apple Trees; Beam Trawler, the Seal; Deck of Beam Trawler; Shacks at Lanesville; New England House; House with a Bay Window; House with Fence; Portuguese Church; Portuguese Quarter; House and Boats. He repeated scenes he had painted in oil ten years earlier, but this time in watercolor: Houses of Squam Light; Italian Quarter and House in Italian Quarter. It was houses— mansions, cottages,

52 shacks, and even sheds — that fascinated him that summer; The Mansard Roof is one of his ﬁnest works. In the fall of 1923 Jo Nivison was invited to exhibit in a show at the Brooklyn Museum. She arranged with the museum to have Hopper enter six watercolors: two showing trawlers in the harbor, and four of neighborhoods and houses in Gloucester, including The Mansard Roof. Critics were lavish in their praise of Hopper’s work, and the Brooklyn Museum purchased The Mansard Roof for $100. At long last, Hopper was an established a presence in the art world. In 1924 Edward and Jo returned to Gloucester, this time on their honeymoon. Hopper again threw himself into watercolor: Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks; Landscape with Rocks*; Rocks and House; House above a River*; House on the Shore; Gloucester Mansion; Gloucester Factory and House; House and Harbor; Parkhurst’s House; House at the Fort, Gloucester; Rocks at the Fort; and a new view of Haskell’s House. Other paintings that Hopper worked on in 1923 or 1924 include: The Pine Tree; Victorian House*; Street Corner*; Small Town on Cove; Blynman Bridge*; Trawler in Dock; Trawler; Two Trawlers; Destroyer and Rocky Shore; Rocky Shore and Water; Sailboat with Figures*; Houses on the Beach, Gloucester; Group of Houses*; Gloucester Houses*; Back Street, Gloucester; White House with Dormer Window; Outhouses; House by the Sea*; Bell Tower*. In the fall of 1924, Hopper sent some Gloucester watercolors to the New York City art dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, who was so impressed that he gave Hopper a one-man show. Called “Recent Watercolors by Edward Hopper,” the exhibition sold out, and Hopper was ﬁnally able to give up his work as an illustrator (which he detested) and devote all his energies to painting. In the summer of 1926, the Hoppers cut short their summer stay in Rockland, Maine, and returned to Gloucester, where they painted until November. His watercolors included: Gloucester Harbor; House by Squam River; Universalist Church; Trees, East Gloucester;

53 Anderson’s House; Davis House. He also produced an oil, Gloucester Street. Edward and Jo Hopper arrived for their ﬁnal summer in Gloucester on June 28, 1928. The next day they were on hand for the Italian quarter’s second annual celebration of St. Peter’s Fiesta. St. Peter is the patron saint of ﬁshermen; in 1926 a Gloucester ﬁshing captain commissioned a life-size statue of St. Peter to be displayed in a downtown storefront window. Gloucester, in a burst of pride, organized its ﬁrst St. Peter’s Fiesta, a day of worship and celebration. Today the St. Peter’s Fiesta draws people from all over New England, and from beyond. Once again, Hopper focused on the village, not the harbor, painting Freight Cars, Gloucester; Cape Ann Granite; House on Middle Street, Gloucester; Adam’s House; Back Street Gloucester; Box Factory, Gloucester; Cape Ann Pasture; Circus Wagon; Hodgkin’s House; Gloucester Roofs; House at Riverdale; Marty Welch’s House; Railroad Gates; Sultry Day; Factory and Shed. In 1928 Edward Hopper was forty-six years old. With Jo’s help, and often at her initiative, he had turned his life around. His feelings for Jo in those years are shown in two works, Jo Sketching at Good Harbor Beach* in 1923, and, in the following year, Jo Sleeping. Sources: (1) Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Gloucester” (2) Mark Kurlansky, The Last Fish Tale

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) In 1967 William C. Seitz, then director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, acknowledged Hopper’s debt to Goethe. “The objects he paints are not simply still life representations or anecdotal props: they have been projected into the realm of ideas, distilled to their essence by a mind that has scrutinized the world of artifacts again and again ... he has meditated on their form and function.... He has often said that what he is trying to paint is himself. This thought is expanded in one of his favorite quotations from Goethe.” Through-

Goodrich out his adult life, Hopper carried that quote in his wallet: “The beginning and end of all literary activity is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, all things being grasped, related, recreated, molded, and reconstructed in a personal form and original manner.” Hopper was in his early 80s when he sat down for an interview with New York Times art critic Brian O’Doherty. In the middle of his comments on Sun in an Empty Room Hopper suddenly threw out this statement: “There’s a beautiful verse in Goethe’s ‘Wanderer’s Night Song.’” O’Doherty recorded that Hopper recited the verse in German before translating it into English: Over all the hills is quiet, Over all the dells you can hardly hear a sound. All the birds are quiet in the woods. Soon you will rest, too. Sources: (1) William C. Seitz, “Edward Hopper: Realist, Classicist, Existentialist” (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Goodrich, Lloyd (1897–1987) Goodrich was among of the ﬁrst to recognize Hopper’s importance as an artist. He never forgot the day in 1926 when he came upon Hopper’s House by the Railroad. The following year Goodrich proﬁled Hopper in The Arts, a New York City publication. He described Hopper as an “eminently native painter,” and praised “Hopper’s independence, which not only kept him from being recognized by the academic world, but also made his own evolution as a painter slower than that of less individual men. This very slowness, however, seems to me to be a sign of the strength and genuineness of his work. He has always been absolutely himself, going his own way and working out his own problems.” Goodrich’s enthusiasm for Hopper never wavered. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he served as director (1958–68), he organized two Hopper retrospectives, one in 1950 and another in 1964. On the day before Hopper died in 1967, Goodrich completed

Ground an essay on Hopper for the “São Paulo 9” exhibition catalog. The end of that essay is as follows: “Through a long career of steady, unwavering growth and achievement, Edward Hopper has created, out of our familiar everyday world, an art that is at once purely individual, powerfully conceived, and profound in its emotional content.” Because of Goodrich’s steadfast commitment to Hopper, Jo Hopper bequeathed Hopper’s entire artistic estate, more than 3,000 works, to the Whitney Museum in 1968. She also made a personal bequest to Goodrich of four ledger books, in which the couple had kept meticulous records of all of the artworks by Hopper; Goodrich bequeathed these to the Whitney as well. Sources: (1) Lloyd Goodrich, “The Paintings of Edward Hopper” (2) Lloyd Goodrich, “Edward Hopper.”

Ground Swell 1939. Oil on canvas, 361 ⁄2 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (92.7 ¥ 127.6 cm), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.— Working in his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio, Hopper completed this oil late in the summer of 1939. He knew the language of the sea. A groundswell begins in a distant storm or earthquake, and can cause a bell buoy many miles away to ring, even when there is no visible sign of danger. In this scene, the channel marker’s alarm has interrupted a perfect day for sailing: bright sun, blue sky, a good breeze, and no threat of rain. Hopper’s catboat is accurate in its detail, down to its barn-door rudder. Hearing the bell, the catboat’s occupants — four men and a woman — realize that danger is on the way. Hopper was halfway into the painting when, on September 1, 1939, Germany launched a lightning-fast attack on Poland. Yale art history professor Alexander Nemerov sees Ground Swell as a “sign of a distant commotion, some faraway chaos, now rolling in ominously on a bright and otherwise calm day on the New England coast.” Nemerov compares the bell buoy to a radio and the catboat crew to Americans who huddled around the radio to hear the

54 news of war. The painting, asserts Nemerov, is “an allegory of distant wars making their presence felt on American shores.” Nemerov’s analysis may be a stretch. If Hopper felt any war anxiety, he didn’t show it. He was politically conservative, and viewed Hitler’s military expansion as nothing more than another phase of European history. Source: Alexander Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939.”

Haskell’s House 1924. Watercolor on paperboard, 131 ⁄2 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.— The house in this painting was built by Loring Boyd Haskell (1850–1934), one of the wealthiest men in Gloucester, Maccachusetts. The residence, at 6 Marchant Street, reﬂects Haskell’s personality and community standing. It rises atop a steep hill, seemingly aloof from the business district below, and yet its ornate design demands attention. When Hopper included Haskell’s name in the title he initiated a practice he would follow when painting other houses. Hopper somehow understood that houses reﬂect the personalities of their owners. Loring B. Haskell started his French Second Empire house in 1875, explains Gloucester preservationist Prudence Paine Fish, to compete with his older brother, Howard, who was building a similar but smaller house at 5 Marchant Street, directly opposite. Over the years, each brother embellished his house, but “Loring was not about to be outdone,” Fish reports. By 1898 he had constructed a taller tower, completely dwarﬁng Howard’s modest tower. Fish lists Loring’s upgrades: “The widow’s walk was gone ... there was a large addition on the left side and a new bay window ... the addition terminated in a six-story tower ... it was a very eccentric blend of French Second Empire and Queen Anne details ... Loring added more porches until it became an incredible landmark.” This was Hopper’s second painting of Loring Haskell’s residence; a 1923 version (also titled Haskell’s House) shows the structure in side

55 view, with no hint of the hill beneath. This 1923 painting is impressionistic (a muted rendering of a widow’s walk, mansard roof, and side porch) and lacks the strength and drama of the 1924 version. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes that while “both views are truthful, despite their realism they are very different in emotional impact.” This is due in large part to the vantage point. In 1924 Hopper depicted a house rising boldly into the sun, aggressively celebrating its many trimmings and ﬂourishes. Jo Hopper nicknamed the 1924 house “The Wedding Cake House,” a pet name she would never have applied to the 1923 painting. When Haskell’s House was shown at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1924, a New York Times art critic offered high praise: “Hopper takes a blatantly hideous structure with a mansard roof ﬂaunting its ugliness on a small hillock that repeats the disagreeable shape of the roof, places it behind two telephone poles, intensiﬁes his subject, taking none of the shortcuts of the modernists, and builds in the splendor of its composition a new house and a new hill without losing any of the spirit that built the old.” Two years later, when the painting was exhibited in Boston, it drew this response in the Boston Transcript: “Who does not know such a house? It stands perched above a long ﬂight of stone steps, all bay windows, lightning rods, and scroll saw ornaments. From the roof ... rises a square tower.” George Bellows, who, with Hopper, was one of Robert Henri’s most gifted students, purchased the 1924 version of Haskell’s House, along with House in Italian Quarter, only months after they were ﬁrst exhibited. Sources: (1) Prudence Paine Fish, Antique Houses of Gloucester (2) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (3) “Art: Exhibition of Watercolors,” The New York Times (4) “Houses and Other Things: Exhibition of Etchings and Watercolors at St. Botolph Club,” Boston Transcript .

Haunted House 1926. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine — Hopper found an abandoned

Hemingway boardinghouse near the shipyard at the Rockland harbor. Haunted House was one of twentyseven watercolors Hopper painted during his seven-week stay in Maine. Art reviewer Maggie Knowles ﬁlls in some details: “Using an unlikely palette — albino white grass, cobaltblue shadows — Hopper smears the canvas with a supernatural aura. The house itself shivers against a winter-gray sky, self-conscious with her boarded-up windows and neglected paint. She is an aging beauty queen who has been forgotten.... The ghosts inside count the days to her demolition.” The house, once located at 5 South Street in Rockland, has since been demolished. After attending the 2004 exhibition, “Edward Hopper’s Rockland,” at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Knowles concluded that “houses were fascinating to Hopper because of their human-life qualities. Over the span of his career, dilapidated and wary homes were steadfast muses.” Source: Maggie Knowles, “Tripped Up: A Hopper, Skip, and a Jump to Blahport.”

Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) Hemingway and Hopper were independent, no-nonsense individuals who approached their art in a similar manner, each stripping his work of nonessentials. One of Hemingway’s many stories built on sparse dialogue was “The Killers,” ﬁrst published in Scribner’s in March 1927. After reading it, Hopper wrote to the editor of Scribner’s, praising the work for it honesty and lack of artiﬁce. “The Killers,” writes scholar Gordon Theisen, “is as much a slice of life as a Hopper painting, as narrowly and intently focused, as dry in tone and economical in means, as dependent for effect on what it leaves out.” Hemingway’s story may have played a part in Hopper’s creation of Nighthawks: “The Killers” opens in a diner outside Chicago; there are four people in the diner; two of them sit together planning a murder; there is an aura of menace and brutality. Source: Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche

Henri

56

Henri, Robert (1865–1929)

High Noon

Henri was a distant cousin of Mary Cassatt. Born Robert Henry Cozad, he changed his name at age 17 to Robert Earle Henri (at this time everyone in the family assumed false names to protect Robert’s father, an escapee from murder charges in Nebraska). In his early 20s, Henri began classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, coming under the inﬂuence of Thomas Eakins. Between 1894 to 1902 he studied and taught in both Philadelphia and Paris, France. Hopper was already a student at the New York School of Art when Henri joined the teaching staff in 1902. Henri immediately began to speak out on art, philosophy and contemporary theater, and Hopper was among the students who gathered to listen. Henri urged them to take on the gritty subject matter of city life: street corners, saloons, boxing rings, tenements, dance halls, and the like. He was “a magnet for younger artists,” writes art historian Robert Hughes. “They drank together, had long poker sessions, bellowed poetry at one another, and argued late into the night.” Hopper learned from Henri that the true subject of a painting is not the object painted but an idea. “Hopper’s statements on painting reﬂected many of Henri’s ideas,” writes art historian Pamela Koob. “[Hopper] believed that great art expressed an artist’s ‘inner life’ which he described as ‘a vast and varied realm.’ ... He said his paintings reﬂected his sympathetic responses to human experience, something he was quick to distinguish from ‘superﬁcial anecdote.’” Hopper later declared his debt to Henri: “Of his enthusiasm and his power to energize his students I had ﬁrst-hand knowledge. Few teachers of art have gotten so much out of their pupils, or given them so great an initial impetus.”

1949. Oil on canvas, 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 391 ⁄ 2 inches, (69.9 ¥ 100.3 cm), The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio—In High Noon, a woman stands, goddess-like, in the doorway of a white clapboard house. She looks directly into a bright sunlight. The Dayton Art Institute website describes the painting as “characteristic of Hopper’s mature style of simpliﬁed planes, broad blocks of color, isolated ﬁgures, and detached viewpoint ... the composition is highly ordered, and many details, such as vegetation and a pathway to the door, have been left out ... nothing has been left to chance.” This painting did not come easily for Hopper. Struggling to get the light and shadows exactly right, he built a little cardboard model house, then put it in the sun to see the light and shadow effects. There is little realism in High Noon, and more than a bit of de Chirico: the house sits in the middle of nowhere, and no path leads to the door. Art critic Robert M. Coates has written that Hopper invests houses “with a curiously haunting, brooding, but an august melancholy that is hard to deﬁne and yet unmistakable. At his best, he gets overtones of feeling and meaning that are close to surrealism.”

Sources: (1) Bennard B. Perlman: Robert Henri: His Life and Art (2) Robert Hughes, American Visions (3) Pamela Koob, “States of Being: Edward Hopper and Symbolist Aesthetics.”

Source: Robert M. Coates, “The Art Galleries: Edward Hopper.”

Highland Light, North Truro 1930. Watercolor on paper, 165 ⁄ 8 ¥ 253 ⁄4 in. (42.3 ¥ 65.3 cm), Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts—Hopper painted this lighthouse station during his ﬁrst summer on Cape Cod. From a considerable distance he shows the entire complex, and even the curving road leading to it. Sunlight streams in from the left, splashing up against the keepers’ houses, other outbuildings and the lighthouse tower itself. The terrain and the sky form two horizontal planes. The tower is the dominant vertical element, of course, backed up by roof peaks, chimneys, and one of Hopper’s favorite vertical devices, telephone poles. All this is silhouetted against white clouds beneath a light blue sky. Highland Light, like the lighthouses at Two

57 Lights and Portland Head, has a notable history. In 1797 the U.S. purchased the ten-acre tract and the next year built the lighthouse, originally called Cape Cod Light. “The tower in Hopper’s watercolor,” curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes, “had replaced the original in 1857, and in 1930, when Hopper ﬁrst saw it, kerosene fueled the lamps and the mechanism was wound by hand three times every night ... two years later, electricity replaced kerosene as the source of illumination, making Highland Light the fourth most powerful beam in the United States.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Hills, South Truro 1930. Oil on canvas, 273 ⁄ 8 ¥ 431 ⁄ 8 in. (69.2 ¥ 109.2 cm), The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio—This landscape was painted on site, during the Hopper’s ﬁrst summer at Cape Cod. Battling mosquitoes, Hopper spent a full day developing the canvas; the horizontal elements in his ﬁnished composition— the railroad track, rolling hills, sea and sky — all add to the vast sweep of the scene. The still atmosphere, the absence of ﬁgures, and the contrast of sunlight and dark shadow contribute to a mood of desolation and loneliness. In 1931, Hopper’s friend and fellow artist Guy Pène du Bois wrote that Hills, South Truro was “one of the most digniﬁed American landscapes.... Its order, measure and proportion ... give it a simple and profound majesty ... Hills, South Truro brings us back to those moments ... when we have felt the presence of some power beyond our strength, of that cosmic order or harmony existing beyond the chaos of our little lives.” Source: Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper.

Hitchcock, Alfred (1899–1980) Hitchcock and Hopper each had the ability to transform everyday settings into edgy and sometimes even threatening images. Art historian Margaret Iversen asserts that when Hitchcock appropriated Hopper’s 1925 House by

Hodgkin’s the Railroad for his 1960 ﬁlm Psycho, he “recognized the deeply disquieting quality of the work and used it.” Hitchcock’s house and Hopper’s house have now become almost interchangeable. It’s hard to know which of the two is being described by writer and poet Mark Strand: “The house is really a tomb.... It is like an elaborate cofﬁn in sunlight; it shines with ﬁnality, and has no door. In its starkness it promises so little that its air of absolute denial cannot be taken personally and can only be trivialized by attempts to associate it with loneliness. True, it stands alone, but does so with rigid, disdainful insularity.” There are other afﬁnities between Hitchcock and Hopper. Both employ high-angle perspectives (as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Hopper’s Ofﬁce in a Small City). And both ask us to peek in on their scenes through windows. Iversen points out that Psycho “begins with the camera moving slowly over a cityscape and then zeroing in and entering one partially open window. This apparently arbitrary intrusion is also characteristic of Hopper’s cityscapes, where the open windows of apartment buildings reveal embryonic narratives.” And how many “embryonic narratives” do we peek in on in Hitchcock’s Rear Window! James Stewart’s character looks into the windows of his neighbors across the courtyard; he imagines their stories and even assigns names, such as “Miss Lonely Heart,” just as Hopper named the ﬁgures in his paintings. Sources: (1) Margaret Iversen, “In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny” (2) Mark Strand, “Hopper: The Loneliness Factor.”

Hodgkin’s House 1928. Oil on canvas, 28 ¥ 36 in. (71.1 ¥ 91.4 cm), Private Collection — Hopper found this 1850 structure at Cape Ann, on the road leading north from where he and his wife were summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The dormered cottage was surrounded by green everywhere except for two elements, splotches of red geraniums and a white picket fence. When art critic E.C. Sherburne came upon the painting at Hopper’s retrospective

Homer (his ﬁrst) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1933, he found it “enchanting ... with its assimilation of French cottage windows, Swiss chalet decoration, American colonial mass, Yankee ship’s carpenter doorway, village carpenter dormer and Montgomery Ward awnings. This ensemble deserves preservation.” Seventy-four years after the MoMA retrospective, Hodgkin’s House was chosen to be the ﬁrst image seen by throngs attending the 2007 Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The museum believed the painting captured the spirit of the exhibition’s subtitle: “the ordinary, made extraordinary.” Holland Cotter of the New York Times agreed: “In the picture, late (or very early) sunlight hits one side of a white clapboard house, leaving the rest of it in shadow. There are no ﬁgures; none are needed. Illumination and architecture engage in an expressive exchange. The house, with its two high-arched windows, seems to greet the light with shy consternation, like a prim Victorian Danae startled by a shower of gold. This is the Hopper Effect: the impression of everyday life touched with secular sanctity.” Sources: (1) E. C. Sherburne, “The Hopper Exhibition” (2) Holland Cotter, “Hopper’s America, in Shadow and Light.”

Homer, Winslow (1836–1910) Turning to watercolor in the mid-1920s, Hopper took the art world by surprise. From the start, critics compared him to Winslow Homer. Both began their careers in illustration; both painted their ﬁrst notable watercolors in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Homer in 1873 and Hopper ﬁfty years later; both worked along the rocky New England shoreline. Their careers followed the same curve. “Homer was,” writes artist and art historian Robert J. Demarest, “steadfastly ignoring the ‘establishment’ and painting ordinary life extraordinarily. His pursuit of his own vision helped push American art into the modern era. His late compositions, his spare simplicity and ‘picture sense’ preﬁgured modern art.”

58 In 1945 Lloyd Goodrich called Hopper “the foremost representative today of the naturalistic style initiated by Winslow Homer, whom he admires and whom he resembles in many ways.” Goodrich felt that Hopper had “less spontaneity or movement” than Homer, but that his watercolors had “compensating qualities; they are more solid and round, more designed, richer in technique. His color is robust and full-bodied, with a clarity like that of his forms.... Hopper is one of the ablest living craftsmen in watercolor, his touch is ﬁrm, steady, crisp.... A series done in Mexico in 1943 offers remarkable parallels to Homer’s tropical watercolors.” Sources: (1) Robert J. Demarest, Traveling with Winslow Homer (2) Lloyd Goodrich, American Watercolor and Winslow Homer.

Hopper, Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith (1854–1935) Hopper was proud of the French part of his mother’s ancestry. Elizabeth was descended from François Le Sueur, born in 1625 into a well-established family of cloth makers in Normandy, France. In 1879 Elizabeth married Garret Henry Hopper; the ceremony was held in the Smith family home built by her father in Nyack, New York. The newlyweds would live in that home for the remainder of their lives. Their children were Marion (born 1880) and Edward (born 1882). Edward began to draw at an early age; Elizabeth, whose family had included several artists, encouraged her son’s artistic pursuits, and in 1899 she allowed him to commute to New York City to study illustration. Making use of her family’s money and her religious connections, she ﬁnanced Edward’s 1906 trip to Paris, France, and his lodgings at the Eglise Evangelique Baptiste, at 48 rue de Lille. Aware of his mother’s dominant role in the family, Edward treated her with deference. Sometime around 1915, when Hopper was in his early thirties, he traveled across the Hudson River to Nyack and worked on a large oil painting of his mother. Curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art have titled it Eliz-

59 abeth Grifﬁths Smith Hopper, the Artist’s Mother. Elizabeth outlived Garret Hopper by 22 years, witnessing Hopper’s rise to prominence and his 1933 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Her planned visit to Hopper’s newly built South Truro, Cape Cod, studio never came off, for she died in 1935 at the age of eighty-one. Source: Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., “Edward Hopper: His Rockland Heritage and Legacy.”

Hopper, Garret Henry (1852–1913) Hopper’s father, Garret, was descended from Andries Hoppen, a merchant born in Amsterdam, Holland, who immigrated to America in 1652. Andries established a family in lower Manhattan, not far from the spot where Edward Hopper would later live for 54 years. Garret was the eighth generation of his Hudson River Dutch family to live in the New York City area. Garret was an infant when his father died. He and his mother, Charity Blauvelt Hopper, were left destitute and forced to live with Charity’s father in New York City. When Garret was twelve, his grandfather died, and Garret had to quit school and go to work to support his mother. Shortly after ﬁnding work in Nyack, New York, he met and married Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith in 1879, moving into the comfortable upper-middle class home owned by his bride’s widowed mother at 82 North Broadway. Garret and Elizabeth quickly had two children, Marion in 1880 and Edward in 1882. In 1890 Garret purchased a store a few blocks from his home and renamed it “G.H. Hopper Dry Goods.” He took an active part in the community and served as a deacon in the First Baptist Church of Nyack. Helping out in the dry goods store, young Edward came to realize his father’s limitations. Garret Hopper was more interested in books than in business success. In fact, Garret’s greatest gift to his son was the love of reading. The household’s extensive library contained many of the classics of philosophy and literature, which Edward read eagerly.

Hopper When Edward was at the beginning of his formal art studies, Garret agreed to pose for several sketches and then a watercolor portrait, Garret Henry Hopper, the Artist’s Father*. The portrait shows him in business suit, wideeyed, looking a bit like a frightened deer. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Hopper, Josephine Verstille Nivison (1883–1968) Josephine Nivison and Edward Hopper were wed in 1924. “Jo” as she was known, was a watercolorist and already an established ﬁgure on the New York City art scene. “When she married Edward Hopper,” art critic Gaby Wood notes “Josephine Nivison was 41, and had been painting successfully for 16 years. Her work had been shown alongside that of Modigliani and Picasso, Maurice Prendergast and Man Ray. She regularly sold drawings to the New York Tribune, the Evening Post and the Chicago Herald Examiner. In 1924 ... a New York Times review of a group show at the Brooklyn Museum singled her work out for praise over that of Georgia O’Keeffe and John Singer Sargent.” Jo was a lifelong resident of Manhattan and, like Hopper, proud of a French lineage (“Verstille” was the surname of her paternal grandmother). After receiving a degree from Normal College of the City of New York (now Hunter College) in 1905, she became an elementary school teacher. She also enrolled in evening classes at the New York School of Art at a time when Hopper was winding up his studies there. Jo caught the eye of her art instructor Robert Henri and became the subject of his painting, The Art Student. “She was standing in her old paint-spattered apron at the close of a lesson,” Henri later recalled, “with her paint brushes clutched ﬁrmly in her little ﬁst, listening to a conversation. She seemed a little human question mark, and everything about her, every line of her dress, suggested the idea. I wanted to paint her just as she was, and I asked her to pose for me the next day. I was afraid she couldn’t assume the same pose and the

Hopper same look, but it happened that as she entered my studio she fell into the same energetic, questioning attitude. I had to paint very rapidly to get it.” In 1907 Jo traveled to Holland to participate in Henri’s summer classes, continuing on to Italy, and then to Paris, France, where she was fell in love with the brilliant color of Matisse (curator Elizabeth Thompson Colleary feels that “Jo’s use of glowing, lyrical color” was “an expression of her vibrant personality”). Over the years, Jo made a name for herself in art while continuing to teach in New York’s public schools. She spent her summers in art colonies in New England, and in 1914 she and Hopper made brief contact while staying at the same boarding house in Ogunquit, Maine. In 1915 Jo became a member of the Washington Square Players, appearing in productions at the Bandbox Theatre on 57th Street. Jo retired from teaching in 1921. Jo’s summer trip to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1923 was a life-changing event. She met up again with Hopper, they went off on painting excursions, and fell in love. It was a fateful summer for Hopper — Jo convinced him to put aside his oils and to try his hand at watercolor. Later that year when Jo was invited to exhibit her watercolors at the Brooklyn Museum, she urged the jurors to look over Hopper’s watercolors. The Mansard Roof became part of the exhibition, and received glowing praise from the critics. At the exhibition’s close, the Brooklyn Museum purchased the painting for $100. Hopper’s only other sale of a painting had come sixteen years earlier. Jo’s marriage to Hopper propelled his career at the expense of hers, a circumstance documented by Hopper scholar Gail Levin. Jo took on the role of Hopper’s manager and art agent, organizing his haphazard records, keeping a detailed account of his sales, penning all his correspondence, making his phone calls and dealing with critics and with journalists seeking interviews. “Jo Hopper exerted such control over Edward Hopper’s work,” writes Gaby Wood, “that she came to see it as a collaboration. They had no biological offspring,

60 but Jo repeatedly referred to her husband’s paintings as their ‘children’ ... She referred to her own paintings as ‘poor little stillborn infants.’” Wood notes that Jo “jealously insisted on being the model for every single woman he painted.” Trained as an actor, Jo relished the idea of modeling Hopper’s ﬁgures, whether lounging against the wall as an usherette or nude as a burlesque queen. Her championing of Hopper was tinged with regret and resentment, for she lacked time and the opportunity to pursue her own art career. Moving into Hopper’s cramped studio space at 3 Washington Square North left her nowhere to paint. Her mood improved only when Hopper in 1932 rented additional space where Jo could set up a small painting studio. She also began to paint out of doors during their summers in South Truro. She exhibited her watercolors at the Cape Cod Artist’s Association, at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was especially pleased in 1958, notes curator Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, “when ten of her paintings were included in an exhibition at Herman Gulack’s newly opened Greenwich Gallery at 71 Washington Place, at the south end of Washington Square South Park.” Her ﬁnal exhibited painting came in 1965 at the New York World’s Fair: Chez Hopper, a landscape showing the South Truro summerhouse. Sources: (1) Gaby Wood, “Man and Muse” (2) Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (3) Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, “Josephine Nivison Hopper: Some Newly Discovered Works” (4) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Hopper, Marion Louise (1880–1965) During their childhoods, Marion doted on her younger brother, Edward. It seems that, even in his youth, Hopper was intrigued by the theatrical; Marion liked to stage puppet shows and made Edward her willing assistant. As they entered adulthood, each enjoyed the other’s company. Edward’s letters to Marion from Paris, France, were less formal than those to his mother. Contact between the two lessened after Edward’s return from Europe

61 and his 1910 move to New York City. It was only after Edward’s 1924 marriage to Josephine Nivison that the Nyack, New York, connection was regularized, a responsibility taken on by Jo. The death of their mother, Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith Hopper, in 1935 left Marion alone in the Nyack home. She never married nor held a job; the Hoppers helped her to meet living expenses. Edward garaged his car in Nyack and the Hoppers visited with Marion before and after each extended motor trip; occasionally, Marion took the bus into New York City to visit them. In 1937 she made a visit to the Hoppers’ South Truro cottage, where she was assigned to sleep on an attic cot. Angry over the accommodations, Marion directed her animosity, not at her brother Edward, but at Jo. It was Marion’s one and only trip to Cape Cod. In her later years, Marion’s activities centered on Nyack’s Baptist Church. When her health began to fail, the church’s minister, Arthayer Sanborn, became her friend and caretaker. He looked in on her, listened to her stories, and drove her to visit Edward at the New York City studio. When Marion died in 1965, the Reverend Sanborn ofﬁciated at her funeral. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Hopperesque Peter Schjeldahl used the term “Hopperesque” as the title for his essay in “Edward Hopper: Light Years,” the catalog for a 1988 exhibition at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York City. Critics use the term to refer to art, ﬁlm, or literature that evokes the atmosphere of Hopper’s paintings, especially when they come across something indeﬁnable, unsettling, or strangely out of place. Schjeldahl asserts that looking at a Hopper painting is often jarring, “like a car hitting a rock in the road.” Hopper’s style or subject matter is not at the root of the term, Schjeldahl explains, but rather “the way it is put together and how the construction grips you.... There are oddly angled vertiginous spaces and dramatic light, and color that sneaks up on you.”

Hotel Art historian Lucy Fischer equates the terms “Hopperesque” and “ﬁlm noir,” noting that the “unpeopled streets, the elongated shadows, the angular buildings that guard empty space like grim sentinels” in ﬁlm noir “recall the eerie night-time cityscapes in the paintings of Edward Hopper.” Fischer lines up the examples: “Norman Bates’s Victorian residence in Psycho (1960) and Hopper’s House by the Railroad ... the innocuous (but pernicious) Santa Rosa, California neighborhood in Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and the street scene in Hopper’s Sun on Prospect Street ... the voyeuristic sequences in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) and a woman glimpsed in an apartment in Hopper’s Night Windows ... the railroad intrigue of Strangers on a Train (1951) and the passengers in Hopper’s Chair Car ... the dark sense of urban danger in M (1931) and Hopper’s expressionist Night Shadows.” Sources: (1) Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox (2) Lucy Fischer, “The Savage Eye: Edward Hopper and the Cinema.”

Hotel by a Railroad 1952. Oil on canvas, 311 ⁄ 4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (79.4 ¥ 101.9 cm), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.— The sixtysomething couple depicted in this painting share a cheap hotel room, yet neither acknowledges the other’s presence. Slouched in an armchair is a gray-haired woman in a pink slip, reading a book. A man fully dressed in trousers, shirt, and vest, cigarette in hand, stands at the window, taking in a bleak scene: a rear wall of the hotel, a set of railroad tracks, and a nondescript building across the way. Sunlight ﬂoods the room and bathes both ﬁgures, and yet there is no sense of warmth; the two seem worn out, tired of life and of each other. “Hopper’s world,” James Mellow observed in 1971, “is a world of adults only, children never intrude upon the scene. He uses his ﬁgures sparingly: solitary men or women, manageable groups of three or four — never crowds. And there is, throughout his work, an ever-recurring couple—the bored young marrieds of ‘Room in New York,’ the boss and his

Hotel secretary in ‘Ofﬁce at Night,’ the seedy aging couple in ‘Hotel by a Railroad’—actors in a continuous private scenario that is drawn, one suspects, from Hopper’s own cloistral married life.” Source: James R. Mellow, “The World of Edward Hopper.”

Hotel Lobby 1943. Oil on canvas, 321 ⁄ 4 ¥ 403 ⁄ 4 in. (81.9 ¥ 103.5 cm), Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana — Hopper was attracted to social spaces of the modern age: the Automat, the diner, the movie theater. Hotel Lobby shows four ﬁgures: a well-dressed older couple, the woman seated, the man standing next to her; across from them, a young woman in short dress and high heels; behind the counter, in the dark, a desk clerk. These ﬁgures occupy their own space, remaining in a state of limbo — neither here nor there, just marking time. To curator Harriet Warkel, the themes of the painting are “waiting, transience, age.” Art historian Wieland Schmied comments on Hopper’s preliminary drawings for Hotel Lobby: “Again and again he varied the cast of characters, putting a young man in the girl’s place at the right, or sketching an additional ﬁgure in the chair next to the lady on the left. He also varied the ﬁgures’ positions and poses. Initially, the couple in evening dress had eye contact with each other, but Hopper decided to let the man look away.” Art editor Lou Harry also compared the drawings to the ﬁnished painting: “Hopper clearly was working through not just composition but also content. The elderly man and the hatted woman seem to be talking in one of the sketches, while in the ﬁnished version their lips are sealed. A stairway is replaced by the hint of an empty dining room. Both changes, and others more subtle, heighten the sense of isolation, accentuating what we now think of the Hopper style.” In 1945, an art critic for Time magazine cited Hotel Lobby, “in which the pattern of electric light on the tired transients and common place interior creates an illusion of a moment stopped in time, turning the genteel lobby into a monument of weariness and melancholy.”

62 Sources: (1) Harriet Warkel, Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s Hotel Lobby (2) Wieland Schmied, Edward Hopper: Portraits of America (3) Lou Harry, “Out of the Hopper: drawings reveal artist’s process” (4) “Art: Artists’ Choice,” Time.

Hotel Room 1931. Oil on canvas, 60 ¥ 651 ⁄ 4 in. (152.4 ¥ 165.7 cm), The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain — Here we see a young woman traveler newly arrived for the night. She sits at the edge of a bed in her camisole, staring at a yellow paper in her hand. An overhead light brightens the top of her head, leaving her face in shadow. Her bags are still unpacked; she has thrown her clothing about — dress over a chair, hat sitting on a bureau, shoes on the ﬂoor. There is almost no room for her to move about. The blackness of the night, seen through the window, seems to mirror her mood. It’s likely that Hopper was more interested in composition than in narrative. Art critic Charles W. Millard describes Hotel Room as “a broadly composed picture in which a shallow diagonal space is inhabited by a human ﬁgure entirely in scale with its surroundings, a rounded and harshly green chair, and a few personal belongings. Objects and a ﬁgure that might otherwise be intrusive are subsumed into the whole by the strength of the overall composition and the luminosity of the colorism, a non-atmospheric luminosity in which shades are thinly brushed over one another to give resonance. The powerful abstract vertical of the wall deﬁning the left edge of the canvas holds everything in place.” Source: Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper.”

Hotel Window 1955. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 55 in. (101.6 ¥ 139.7 cm), Private Collection — Curator of American art Judith Barter points out that the setting for Hotel Window “could well be a stage set. Sparsely furnished, it seems empty, ﬁlled with only with vertical and horizontal angles. Outside the windows are the types of buildings seen in Nighthawks, but the huge

63 darkened void of the window forms a compositional element that imposes a bleak and heavy modernity upon the space.” Sitting in front of the huge window is another of Hopper’s solitary ﬁgures, a smartly dressed older woman. “We cannot be sure,” writes scholar Rolf Renner, “whether the woman is actually looking at something outside the window or is simply lost in thought.... The street lighting is poor and we cannot make out any of the detail on the house fronts opposite. The inertia of the scene has infected the woman, it seems; her pose is tense and her coat seems unnaturally draped, as if frozen or billowed out by wind.” Publishing magnate Malcolm Forbes bought Hotel Window in 1987 for $1.3 million. Actor/ comedian Steve Martin acquired the painting for $10 million in 1999. Seven years later, he placed the oil on auction at Sotheby’s, New York where it sold for $26.9 million — a new record at the time for a Hopper painting at auction. Sotheby’s catalog commented on the painting’s “close connections to many elements of ﬁlm noir,” especially its “stark light, spare setting and lone female ﬁgure” in “an atmosphere of unease and emptiness.” Sources: (1) Judith A. Barter, “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” (2) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real.

House at of his best, uses windows and lighting to give a sense of separation between individuals.” Separation may have been on Hopper’s mind as he worked on this painting. In 1935 Elizabeth Hopper, his mother, was in failing health and conﬁned to a wheelchair. She died shortly after Hopper completed House at Dusk. Source: Phyllis Braff, “Looking at a ‘Time Capsule.’”

House at Eastham 1932. Watercolor on paper, 191 ⁄2 ¥ 271 ⁄ 2 in. (49.5 ¥ 69.9 cm), Private Collection—Hopper found this house several miles south of his summer rental in South Truro, Cape Cod. With its three-story tower and adjacent utility pole resembling a cross, the structure almost takes on the look of a church. “House at Eastham,” observes curator Virginia Mecklenburg, is “a picture of individuality as well as age.... The house’s verticality testiﬁes to its original owner’s unwillingness to bow to the exigencies of wind and weather that led so many Cape residents to build low structures in hollows between hills and dunes.” The house as described by Mecklenburg is tall, rigid, and quite comfortable in its own style— much like Hopper himself. Off on its own, it stands its ground. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

House at Dusk 1935. Oil on canvas, 361 ⁄4 ¥ 50 in. (92.1 ¥ 127 cm), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia—Here, Hopper shows the sky in diminished hues of yellow and gray, as the sun lowers behind a Georgian-style apartment house. The steps outside ascend into a dark impenetrable wood. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the light in several windows on the building’s top ﬂoor. There, Hopper shows only one ﬁgure, a woman. Hands folded, she peers out the window, her face in shadow. The atmosphere is ethereal, the mood melancholy. “Isolation ﬁgures prominently in Edward Hopper’s compositions,” writes art historian Phyllis Braff. “‘House at Dusk,’ one

House at San Mateo 1941. Watercolor on paper, 133 ⁄ 4 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.9 ¥ 49.5 cm), Collection of Agnes Albert — When the Hoppers made their trip to California by car, they stopped at a motel in San Mateo instead of looking for more expensive lodgings in San Francisco. There, Hopper found the subject of this painting on a side street, and painted it while sitting in the back seat of the car (in the front seat, Jo Hopper was busy painting the same scene). The painting shows a house half-hidden behind two lush palm trees. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg describes the work as “an interesting interplay of open and closed spaces ...

House at moldings of the cornice and the framing of the windows and door are visible between palm fronds, and the front of the house is bathed in light. The pink tones of the sidewalk in the foreground, coupled with the teal and acid yellow highlights of the palms and the cream window shades, resulted in a symphony of luxuriant color.” Of Hopper’s many paintings with “house” in the title, this is one of the few where the house plays a secondary role. In House at San Mateo, the large palms steal the scene. Perhaps this is one reason the painting sat unsold in the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery for fourteen years, before Agnes Albert purchased it in 1955. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

House at Tarrytown 1923. Drypoint on zinc. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — In this drypoint etching, Hopper brings a streak of train rails across the plate. Just beyond the tracks, he situates a weather-beaten two-story house and a factory with two huge smokestacks. To ﬁnd this scene, he rode the Nyack-Tarrytown Ferry (located a few blocks from his family’s home) over to the east bank of the Hudson River, to the foot of Main Street in Tarrytown, New York, just at the spot where the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad made its way along the river. Carl Zigrosser, who was deeply familiar with Hopper and his etchings, once gave this assessment: “House at Tarrytown [is] superbly drawn and rich in the color and texture of the dry-point burr. Hopper has said that House at Tarrytown, unlike most of his prints, was a direct transcript of nature, made either right on the plate or from a sketch done on the spot. It shows his instinctive and unerring sense of design when he can produce so expressive a composition direct from nature.... The old masters were able to do so, and Hopper in this sense is an old master.” Source: Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper.”

64

House by an Inlet 1930. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm), Private Collection — Artist and scholar Barbarie Rothstein equates Hopper’s houses to “archetypes of human dwellings ... solitary and reticent,” and “ﬁlled with ambivalence and conﬂict.” Lacking Hopper’s signature “light on the side of a house,” this house is reserved, introverted. Yellow shades run halfway down the eight windows, and there is no sign of life in the darkened interior. Located at the edge of a sand spit and surrounded by water, the house almost seems to be part of a ﬂoating island. The painting may represent an emotional letdown by Hopper following a creative surge. He completed House by an Inlet in his Washington Square North studio in February 1930, not long after he had painted three exceptional canvases, The Lighthouse at Two Lights, Coast Guard Station, and Railroad Sunset. Source: Barbarie Rothstein, “House, Home and Hopper.”

House by the Railroad 1925. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York — The ﬁrst thing most people think of when they see this painting is the looming Bates dwelling in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Admittedly, House by the Railroad is a strange and unsettling painting. But Hopper, of course, created this oil when Hitchcock was only in his midtwenties and about to direct his ﬁrst silent ﬁlm. Painter and short ﬁlm director Paul Bochner believes that Hopper found this mansard-roofed house nine miles north of his hometown, Nyack, New York. Bochner remembers coming upon the house for the ﬁrst time: “It stopped me dead; it was as familiar and disquieting as a recurring dream.” The house was built in 1885, near the crest of a hill rising up from the west bank of the Hudson River; it became abandoned by the turn of the century, “haunted,” the neighborhood children said. In 1919 it became home to the Gagan

65 family for the next forty-one years. In the 1990s the eldest daughter of that family told Bochner that “in 1925 when she was thirteen, she looked out her bedroom window and saw a man sitting across the road, painting. The man was Edward Hopper.” Hopper never mentioned any of this. He remarked that the house was merely a composite of those he saw in New England and Paris, France. In 1933, Alfred Barr, director of The Museum of Modern Art, argued that “Hopper’s use of grotesque Victorian houses has been overemphasized.... He says that when he came back from France he realized that he had always wanted to paint American houses. Perhaps mansard roofs and cast zinc cornices are subconsciously related to his boyhood in Nyack, but whatever his motive, formal or romantic, he has succeeded in revealing ... the dignity and vigor of such buildings.” In 1930, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art accepted House by the Railroad as a gift from Stephen C. Clark. It was the ﬁrst painting by any artist to enter the museum’s permanent collection. Sources: (1) Paul Bochner, “Someplace Like Home” (2) Alfred Hamilton Barr, Edward Hopper, Retrospective Exhibition, November 1 –December 7, 1933.

House in Italian Quarter 1923. Watercolor on paper, 197 ⁄8 ¥ 237 ⁄ 8 in. (50.5. ¥ 60.6 cm), National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.— This house of bright colors, standing in the sunlight, is one of Hopper’s more striking watercolors rendered in Gloucester, Massachusetts’ Sicilian neighborhood. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes that the house is “in keeping with the exuberant aesthetic of Mediterranean Sicily,” the birthplace of most of the immigrants entering Gloucester at the turn of the 20th century. “They were primarily ﬁshermen who worked hard,” Mecklenburg points out, “rowing or sailing out at dawn, and on their return enlisted the assistance of wives and children to bait hooks and straighten lines for the next day at sea.”

House of Two other Cape Ann subcultures caught Hopper’s eye that summer. A Portuguesespeaking community of Azoreans lived on a hill that sloped down to the harbor in Gloucester; Hopper painted a watercolor showing the two towers of the Our Lady of Good Voyage church, calling it Portuguese Church. Hopper also visited a community of Finnish stonecutters who worked in the quarries at Lanesville ten miles from Gloucester, on the other side of Cape Ann. There, again in watercolor, he painted Shacks at Lanesville. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

House in Provincetown 1930. Watercolor on paper, 191 ⁄2 ¥ 241 ⁄ 2 in. (49.5 ¥ 62.2 cm), Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma — This was the ﬁrst of three paintings completed by Hopper at the outermost tip of Cape Cod, in Provincetown. The other two were Methodist Church Tower, another watercolor, and Rooms for Tourists, an oil. House in Provincetown is one of Hopper’s classic house portraits, in which he shows gables, dormers, fencing and hedges, all in a dialogue between light and shadow. The work’s most striking feature is the brightly lit side of the house. At the end of the hedges Hopper inserts a second home, also sunlit, bringing the shadowed section of the larger house into sharp relief. In House in Provincetown, he was able to double up on his desire to “paint sunlight on the side of a house.” Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Watercolors of Edward Hopper.

House of the Fog Horn III 1929. Watercolor on paper, 135 ⁄ 8 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut—Along with lighthouses, Hopper was so intrigued by this ordinary structure—the fog-signal house at Two Lights, Maine—that he painted it three times, from differing vantage points. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg recounts the history of the fog horn: “In 1869, a square building was

House on constructed to house the boiler that powered a whistle which issued eight-second blasts every minute when the weather was foggy.” House of the Fog Horn I and House of the Fog Horn II, both painted in 1927, show less color, contrast and detail than House of the Fog Horn III. House of the Fog Horn I (1927) presents the structure from a low vantage point that emphasizes the rocky landscape and steep drop to the beach below. It was a cloudy day, so instead of light and shadow, Hopper focused on the rendering of the rocks in muted shades of grays and browns. He also shows an American ﬂag to the right of the painting. That same summer, in House of the Fog Horn II, Hopper used the sun to his advantage to emphasize the north side of the building. Mecklenburg observes that in this painting “the building seems placidly situated on ﬂat ground. A thin line of blue on the horizon at left indicates the location of the water, but only on close examination is the steep drop-off apparent, indicated by a neighboring building partly hidden in the recesses of the rocks below.” Painted two years later, House of the Fog Horn III shows a close-up and detailed view of the south side of the fog-signal house, drenched in sunlight. The house is set amidst yellow grass and green shrubs, with a glimpse of the water in the background. In this painting, the horns are not visible. “Instead,” Mecklenburg notes, “Hopper shows a rear view on which an oil tank and exhaust pipe for the boiler are prominent.” “With these three watercolors,” notes curator Janet Comey, “Hopper took an unglamorous, utilitarian building that other artists would scarcely have noticed and, through well-chosen vantage points, brilliant choice of colors, selective editing, and, above all, the infusion of light, created handsome paintings.” Sources: (1) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (2) Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

House on a Hill, or The Bugg y 1920. Etching on copper. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm), Philadelphia Museum

66 of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — In 1962 Carl Zigrosser, prints curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, summed up House on a Hill: “A couple in a horse and carriage, lower right, are looking at a big mansion, upper center; wooded hill in background.” Zigrosser was commenting on the sixth and ﬁnal state of the etching. In Hopper’s preparatory crayon drawing, the man and woman in the buggy appear to be looking forward, but in his etching, he shows their heads tilted to the left as they look up the hill at the gothic mansion. Humanities professor Walter Wells comments on the backdrop of dark woods “ﬁlling the upper left-hand quadrant and receding, in Hopperesque perspective, beyond the frame at the right. The blinkered horse, indifferent to the house on the rise, pulls the couple along the road ... toward the same vanishing point.” Wells observes that Hopper’s etching would be “as sentimental as a Normal Rockwell print but for its looming hill and ominous linear perspective.” The interest in Hopper’s etchings is growing year by year. At a sale of American art held by Christie’s New York in 2005, a preparatory crayon drawing for House on a Hill went for $307,200. Sources: (1) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper” (2) Walter Wells, Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper.

House on Dune Edge 1931. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection — Hopper painted this stucco house and tower atop a Cape Cod dune near the North Truro train station. To writer Patricia Dempsey, the result is dark and eerie: “Seen from the beach below, ‘House on Dune Edge’ looms against a small sky; bright sunlight hits the curved facade, but one is drawn to the mysterious, deep shadows on the porch. It is situated at much the same angle as ‘House by the Railroad,’ which Hitchcock used as a model for Norman Bates’s house in ‘Psycho.’” Dempsey’s reading of the painting is a stretch. Hopper’s palette, warm shades of mauve, yellow and light blue, is far removed from the stark

67 greys, blacks and browns we see in most of his Cape Cod houses. The house and adjacent shed stand in bright sunlight. The blue trim at the windows and rooﬂines is almost festive, and there is movement and gaiety in the foliage and dune formations that take up the bottom third of the painting. Source: Patricia E. Dempsey, “Solitude’s Shore.”

House on Middle Street, Gloucester 1928. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire — Hopper returned in 1928 to the street in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where, two years earlier, he had painted Davis House. But this time he chose a nondescript house at the other end of Middle Street, at the edge of a working-class neighborhood. Hopper placed his easel only yards away, ﬁlling his compositional space with a house no one else might notice, cropping the structure to eliminate its very ordinary roof. He showed the rest as it was: the awkward entranceway (two sets of stairs, side by side, leading up to separate doorways); faded awning shades at the left entrance; a lawn yellowed and overgrown. Hopper places the house in sunlight, but it is a cold and unrelenting light, not the warm light we see in Davis House. Hopper was no champion of the working class, but he recognized and reported disparities between the rich and the poor. In Davis House his structure stands proud and self-assured, its rich colors reaching out to the sun. The Middle Street house is, in contrast, vulnerable and insecure. “Hopper didn’t just paint handsome or remarkable buildings in Gloucester,” art critic Carl Little emphasizes, “his vision was a democratic one. He did studies of shacks and tenements in the city’s Portuguese and Italian quarters, and he was not adverse to industrial subjects.” Source: Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

House on Pamet River 1934. Watercolor on paper, 193 ⁄ 4 ¥ 25 in. (50.2 ¥ 63.5 cm), Whitney Museum of Amer-

House Tops ican Art, New York — In this close-up view of a Cape Cod house and barn complex, Hopper presents both a realistic subject—white house, green shutters, gray roof and dormer—and an abstract design of geometric forms. Jo Hopper saw the elements of the house as “The things Braque has plus.” Perhaps Jo’s reference to Braque was inﬂuenced by the response to Hopper’s 1933 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. In the retrospective’s catalogue, Alfred Barr noted Hopper’s “alert eye for the interplay of blocks and angles on buildings” and composition that approaches “in appearance, though not in method, certain phases of cubism.” Art critic Helen Appleton Read agreed: “Apparently a realist with a cool objective approach to his subject, [Hopper] in reality creates as ordered a design as any art-for-art’s sake painter could desire ... his pictures can be reduced to as carefully arranged geometric patterns as any cubist ever indulged in.” Sources: (1) Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro” (2) Alfred Hamilton Barr, Edward Hopper Retrospective Exhibition, November 1 –December 7, 1933 (3) Helen Appleton Read, “Edward Hopper.”

House Tops 1921. Etching on copper. Platemark: 6 ¥ 8 in. (15.2 ¥ 20.3 cm), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois—Hopper’s ﬁgures often seem oblivious to their surroundings, especially when the setting is the interior of a train car. Here, a man at the far end of the car is absorbed in his newspaper. Opposite, a young woman turns in her seat and gazes out the window. Carl Zigrosser, curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1940–63), included House Tops in a description of Hopper etchings that evoke feelings of “so much loneliness and isolation.... The means are simple; the work is straightforward. The emotional tension is produced by dramatic selection and deliberate understatement.” As late as the 1930s the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was able to purchase prints of Hopper etchings for under $30. These same prints

House with have now skyrocketed in value. When House Tops was exhibited in 2009 at the Craig F. Starr Gallery in Manhattan, journalist Barrymore Laurence Scherer wrote that the etching “masterfully exhibits the best qualities of the medium — the ﬁneness of his lines and their cumulative textures yield vibrant contrasts of light and shadow. As a tour-de-force by one of America’s greatest artists, House Tops would probably sell between $50,000 and $75,000.” Sources: (1) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper” (2) Barrymore Laurence Scherer, “The New Collector: Of Etching and Edward Hopper.”

House with Big Pine 1935. Watercolor on paper, 201 ⁄ 2 ¥ 251 ⁄ 4 in. (52 ¥ 64.1 cm), Private Collection — Hopper found this subject ten miles from his South Truro, Cape Cod, summer home. He might have better titled this painting “House with Big Pine and Fences,” because of his inclusion of multiple picket fences. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg considers the elaborate fencing to be a well-chosen compositional element: “The fence, tan along the street and white as it angles back beside the house and tree, offers a measured, rhythmic progression in space ... the sprawling boughs of the pine tree engage in a visual dialogue with the utility pole—one ﬂowing and live, the other stark and bare.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

House with a Rain Barrel 1936. Watercolor on paper, 191 ⁄ 2 ¥ 271 ⁄ 2 in. (49.5 ¥ 70 cm), Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana — Hopper painted this isolated clapboard house in a muted palette that blends the man-made with the surrounding natural environment. The offwhite of the clouds merges with the light yellow of the house, which in turn spills over onto the overgrown grass — the picture takes on the glow of soft sunlight. Perhaps it was the structure’s history that caught Hopper’s attention. “Located on Depot

68 Road at the mouth of the Pamet River in Truro,” writes curator Virginia Mecklenburg, “the house had been built about 1875, shortly after the Old Colony Railroad had extended tracks to the end of Cape Cod. George Hamilton, the ﬁrst depot master, sited the building just a few feet back from the tracks and used the lower ﬂoor as a local telegraph ofﬁce and store.... In the early 1930s it was moved and rotated so that the front faced north toward the river instead of west toward the tracks. A porch and kitchen ell were added, plumbing was installed, and it was wired for electricity, although power lines had not yet reached Depot Road.” The following year Hopper returned to paint the house from a considerable distance, making it the focal point of Mouth of Pamet River — Full Tide. “The road, utility pole, and railroad tracks crossing the river,” Mecklenburg asserts, “create a complex image that reafﬁrms the house’s original associations with the telegraph and railroad. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, “Edward Hopper’s Houses.”

houses Hopper’s penchant for rendering houses began in 1923, during his stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He and Josephine Nivison (who would the next year become his wife) explored the harbor area and the Italian and Portuguese neighborhoods. It was Jo who persuaded him to work in watercolor. Among the more than three dozen Gloucester paintings that year were fourteen with the word “house” in the title. Many of the houses were sun-drenched, especially Haskell’s House, House in Italian Quarter, House with a Bay Window, and House and Boats. Hopper’s most spectacular work was The Mansard Roof, showing a house light and gay, dancing through the trees, casting its shadows everywhere. Hopper turned a corner in 1923. In the previous the ten years, he had sold but one painting. But now, six of his Gloucester watercolors were accepted for exhibition at Brooklyn Museum, and the museum purchased The Mansard Roof

69 for $100. In 1924 the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery mounted a solo exhibition of his watercolors, many of them depicting houses, and the entire show sold out. Because Hopper was reluctant to give interviews or to discuss his work, art historians and critics have been tempted to overanalyze his need to paint houses, seeing the paintings, and especially House by the Railroad, as Hopper self-portraits, both subject and artist alienated, lonely, inaccessible and/or haunted. This interpretation took on greater weight when Alfred Hitchcock cited House by the Railroad as the inspiration for the house in “Psycho.” It should be noted that House by the Railroad is not typical of Hopper’s houses. It is but one of the nearly 500 paintings in which he includes one or more houses. Almost 300 of these paintings are watercolors, and the houses rendered in this medium tend to be light, airy, translucent, open, even cheerful. In 1927 an art critic for the New York Times discussed Hopper’s treatment of houses: “He is able to ... ﬁnd in them both energy and delicacy. He shows them exactly as they are while showing them better than they are. But the houses of Gloucester and its neighborhood he especially works this magic. Anderson’s house, Talbot’s house, the house by Squam River, none of these would seem other than abominations of architecture to most of us ... the ornament, profuse and ugly, eloquent of jigsaw conception, obligingly juts out wherever least welcome. Clapboards are thin and bony. But Hopper looks lovingly upon this homeliness.” Watercolors are one thing, oils another. Hopper’s watercolors of houses were created on the spot, leaving little time for introspection. Oils such as House by the Railroad, on the other hand, were composites, created in the studio from sketches and from memory. Planning out a composition and gradually applying oil to canvas, Hopper had every opportunity to burn his thoughts into the process of creation. Source: “Three Races,” New York Times.

Illustration

Houses of Squam Light 1923. Watercolor on paper, 111 ⁄ 4 ¥ 177 ⁄16 in. (28.6 ¥ 44.3 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts — At the suggestion of Josephine Nivison, Hopper painted exclusively in the watercolor medium during his 1923 summer stay in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The setting of Houses of Squam Light is not far from the lighthouse Hopper had painted in oils in 1912. That work, Squam Light, is a cheerful and carefully balanced composition, the central focus a lighthouse standing in the sun; it has the look of a picture postcard. In contrast, the 1923 watercolor seems awkward, with two larger structures partially obscured by boulders, and a third shown at such an odd angle that it seems to be sliding off the hill. Hopper makes a large house the focal point, viewing it straight on. Since the sunlight is entering the scene from the left, almost all of this house is in shadow. There is a ﬁgure on the front porch, barely discernible, and art curator Carol Troyen ﬁnds this typical of Hopper’s New England landscapes, swept clean of human life: “Figures, when present at all, sit on a porch or trudge up the street, indifferent to any romantic potential in the scene. Hopper’s single ﬁgures elicit interest in those who are not visible: the other people in town, the occupants of the houses.” Troyen senses that while Hopper is opposed to charm, he nonetheless uses to the full his ability to fascinate. Source: Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Gloucester.”

illustration In July of 1899, Hopper was 17 years old and newly graduated from high school. He envisioned a career in ﬁne art, but his parents, fearful that he would not be able to support himself, steered him into a study of commercial illustration. In September, he commuted by train and ferry daily to the New York School of Illustrating, in Manhattan. In 1900 he switched over to the New York School of Art where, along with illustration, he studied painting.

Impressionism Beginning in 1906, and for eighteen years thereafter, Hopper peddled illustrations to magazines of popular ﬁction and to trade journals. “Those illustrations,” writes art critic Kathy Field, “showed people in the swim of contemporary social life, handsome, successful and perpetually engaged in glamorous activity ... many of these pictures are not without artistic merit.” In 1910 Hopper took a New York City rental on East 59th Street, earning enough to live, with some frugality, by working at illustration an average of three days each week. “Illustration really didn’t interest me,” Hopper told Brian O’Doherty in 1964. “I was forced to it in an effort to make some money. That’s all. I tried to force myself to have some interest in it. But it wasn’t very real.” The one illustration that did interest Hopper was the one he entered into a nationwide win-the-war contest in 1918 —Smash the Hun earned the $300 ﬁrst prize and a sizable measure of publicity. Hopper gave up illustration for good when the Brooklyn Museum purchased The Mansard Roof in 1923 and when, at his 1924 Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery exhibition, 16 watercolors sold at $100 each. The art world remained largely unaware of Hopper’s work in illustration until 1979, when the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted an exhibition called “Edward Hopper: Prints and Illustrations.” Hilton Kramer’s review for the New York Times was unforgivingly blunt: “Edward Hopper produced a considerable quantity of commercial art in the days before he won serious recognition as a professional ﬁne artist.... In his later years ... he did almost everything he could to conceal and suppress this aspect of his early career and he remained extremely touchy about it all his life ... and one can well understand why Hopper wanted to forget, and have other people forget, that he had ever been associated with such routine rubbish.” Sources: (1) Kathy Field, “Looking Out, Looking In” (2) Brian O’Doherty, “Portrait: Edward Hopper” (3) Hilton Kramer, “Art: Another Side of Hopper.”

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impressionism Hopper ﬁrst encountered French impressionism during the spring and early summer of his 1906–07 visit to Paris, France. Putting to use what he learned from viewing the art of Degas, Manet, Cézanne, and others, he painted almost two dozen oils in the impressionist style. Among his most impressionistic paintings were Le Louvre et la Seine, Trees in Sunlight, Parc de Saint-Cloud; Après-midi de Juin; Trees in Sunlight; Le Parc de Saint-Cloud; Canal Lock at Charenton; and Pavillon de Flore in the Spring. “He forgot the dark, Old Masterlike interiors of his New York student days,” art historian Heinz Liesbrock writes. “His palette lit up and he began to paint with light and quick strokes.” For several years after Hopper returned to New York City, he continued to paint scenes inspired by impressionism. The El Station pictures a New York City train station rendered in soft light and a pastel palette. In Summer Interior Hopper employs the interior compositional elements used by Degas; Gloucester Harbor combines bright sunlight to highlight choppy brushstrokes; Queensborough Bridge shows a soft grey-blue atmosphere with blurred details. Some of his paintings simply had an impressionistic ﬂavor, such as New York Corner, with its misty background, soft gray street, ﬁgures all in black, and Soir Bleu, a scene showing a French carnival. Hopper was unable to sell any of these paintings. It was not until he took up etching in 1915 that he was able to fuse impressionism into his own style. When he returned to oil painting in the mid-1920s, his palette deepened, his light became more intense, and his composition took on a harder edge. “More than just technical effects, impressionism provided Hopper with an understanding of the humanity of modern life, contemporary material culture and mood,” notes curator Judith Barter. “Hopper chose contemporary human subjects and came to function as an intermediary, recording, editing, and expressing the everyday world around

71 him ... we have the sense that we are seeing through the eyes of a twentieth-century ﬂaneur — not the leisured, strolling dandy of mid-nineteenth-century French literature and painting but instead a sharp-eyed pedestrian, observing from street level what he sees on the city avenues.” Hopper knew and appreciated the growth he had experienced under the inﬂuence of impressionism. In 1962 Katharine Kuh put this question to Hopper: “Do you feel your early trips to Europe inﬂuenced you?” Hopper replied: “I really don’t know. I did a lot of work there — paintings that will be shown someday, I suppose. They are in a high key, somewhat like impressionism or modiﬁed impressionism. I think I’m still an impressionist.” Sources: (1) Heinz Liesbrock, Edward Hopper: Forty Masterworks (2) Judith A. Barter, “Nighthawks: Transcending Reality” (3) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists.

Interior 1925. Watercolor with gouache on paper, 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois—This painting may mark the ﬁrst time that Jo Hopper posed for her husband. They were still newlyweds, vacationing and painting in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Interior shows a woman wearing nothing but a pink shift seated at a dresser reading a book balanced on her bare thighs. We see this scene over a board at the foot of a bed, a diagonal that takes up the foreground. “Hopper was noted,” writes artist and writer Robert Henkes, “for the presence of a single character in an essentially stripped environment ... Hopper’s subjects tolerate life individually, refusing to share their sorrow, frustration or despair with others ... causing the victim to dwell in her own misery. In the case of Interior, the female form awaits her destination. Suitcases to the left and right of her person suggest her presence is temporary. One senses that a companion is essential to complete the picture. However, such an addition would defeat the artist’s intent. To add a sec-

intermission ond ﬁgure to Interior would be to sacriﬁce the viewer’s participation. The dialog between the viewer and the subject of the painting would be transferred to the two ﬁgures in the painting. The viewer would truly become an outsider, a spectator.... It is as if the female form in Interior is waiting for the viewer to enter the painting.” Source: Robert Henkes, Themes in American Painting.

Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris* 1906. Oil on wood, 13 ¥ 95 ⁄ 8 in. (33 ¥ 24.4 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This is one of two views Hopper painted of the interior courtyard of the Baptist mission where he resided while on his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France. His palette for both pictures — blue-gray and muted yellow — reﬂects the dreary, rainy weather that fall and winter. Here, his composition is simple: a corner of the courtyard. A window with tie-back curtains takes up the painting’s right half, a doorway entrance the left. A drainpipe running up the wall separates these two elements. Writer Scott Lucas attended “Edward Hopper: The Paris Years,” a 2003 exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was taken by Interior Courtyard and its companion pieces: “These small oil paintings (9 ¥ 12 in. vertical) are the closest precursors to the Hopper we know today—close cropped, closed in and still portraits of places without people ... interiors are spatially expansive, but psychologically cramped; objects are dense with a tangible weight of place, but nearly, often completely, vacant. Places are clean, neat and well lit, but so damn sad. It feels like no one has walked here in years.” Source: Scott Lucas, “Edward Hopper Moments: Paintings from the Artist as a Young Man.”

Intermission 1963. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 60 in. (101.6 ¥ 152.4 cm), Private Collection — This huge painting was one of Hopper’s last theater pieces. The auditorium is well lit, as it would

Italian be during an intermission. There is only a mere glimpse of the stage, off to the extreme right. Our eye is drawn to the row of seats along a wall; seated in one is the painting’s only ﬁgure, a woman. Sporting a dark dress and high-heel pumps, typical ofﬁce attire, she stares off into space. Having some fun, the Hoppers assigned her a name: Norah. When Brian O’Doherty interviewed the couple in 1964, he asked: “Why Norah?” “Maybe she’s Irish,” said Edward. “She’s a maid or something on her night out,” said Jo Hopper. Edward got in the last word: “She’s a coming egghead.” Theatergoers often “people watch” during intermissions; in this case Hopper makes the woman the star of the show, and the rest of us voyeurs. Source: Brian O’Doherty, “Portrait: Edward Hopper”

Italian Quarter 1923. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection — In Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1923 for the summer, Hopper hooked up with Josephine Nivison, another student of Robert Henri. At her urging, he put aside his oils and began to work in watercolor. Hopper and Nivison explored many of the same areas Hopper had frequented on an earlier trip to Gloucester in 1912. Once again he found himself in ethnic neighborhoods, painting houses and village streets, scenes that quickly became associated with him. One might say that houses became Hopper’s trademark. Although Italian Quarter is not social commentary, the painting has the ﬂavor of Ashcan School art, a point made by curator Virginia Mecklenburg: “For Italian Quarter, in which two women stand chatting on a dirt road among rundown buildings, Hopper borrowed a device from Ashcan artists William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and George Luks, who had used buxom bodies, white aprons, and casual stances as attributes to identify immigrant women. By situating two immigrant women adjacent to sizable if somewhat ramshackle homes, Hopper acknowledged the success Ital-

72 ian ﬁsherman had already achieved in the life and economy of the town.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Italian Quarter, Gloucester 1912. Oil on canvas, 233 ⁄8 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.2 ¥ 72.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Here, Hopper captures the color and liveliness of wood-frame houses in a working-class neighborhood of SicilianAmerican ﬁshermen and their families. An alley leads from the houses in the foreground to another house about a block away, creating a “scene within a scene,” a device often used in Dutch genre painting, and one that probably caught Hopper’s eye during his 1907 visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. In 1912, Hopper was gaining control over his use of light and color, and in Italian Quarter, Gloucester he is on his way to establishing an independent style. “Lights and dark are subtly distributed throughout the composition,” writes art critic Charles W. Millard, “the lights darkened slightly by their mixed tones and the shadows lightened by being made transparent.... The colors are the mixed — in this case yellowed—greens, mustards, and brick reds of which Hopper was such a master.” Italian Quarter, Gloucester marks the beginning of Hopper’s penchant for painting houses. “In this canvas,” writes art historian Carl Little, “Hopper already displays his fascination with architectural conﬁgurations, how one rooﬂine plays off against the other, how windows lend a structure personality, how a house sits in its surroundings.” The painting reminds Little of the kind of advice Hopper and his classmates received in the early 1900s from their teacher, Robert Henri: “I want to see these houses solid, I want them to feel like houses, I don’t care about your drawing and your values — they are your affair. They will be good if you make me sense the houses and they will be bad, however ‘good’ they are if you do not make those houses live.” Sources: (1) Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper” (2) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

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Jenness House Looking North 1934. Watercolor, 20 ¥ 28 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.1 cm), John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida — This is the second of four watercolors completed by Hopper of the home then owned by Kelly and Harriet Jenness of Truro, Massachusetts. Kelly Jenness House, painted in 1932, shows the home amidst the grassy dunes of Cape Cod. The Jennesses befriended the Hoppers; two years later Edward and Jo made use of the Jenness home while waiting for their South Truro, Cape Cod, studio to be completed. It was during this sevenweek wait that Hopper painted three more views of the Jenness house. Of the four paintings, Jenness House Looking North comes closest to abstract art. Hopper shows the structure nestled in the dunes, calling attention to the geometry of its dark red roof. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg suggests that the “North” in the title “revealed that he worked on the watercolor in the morning when the sun was at his right, casting the rear of the white building in soft blue shadow.” Jenness House III is more conventional. Hopper presents a front view of the house, complete with a white picket fence that protects a small garden. In Jenness House IV, the view is from above and at a considerable distance; in this way Hopper was able to also show the house of Katy and John Dos Passos. This last painting was inscribed to Harriet Jenness in thanks for the use of their summer home. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors

Jo in Wyoming 1946. Watercolor on paper, 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—Hopper painted his wife, Jo Hopper, during their second trip to northern Wyoming. Here, Hopper frames Jo inside their Buick as she sits with brush in hand, painting the Grand Teton Mountains. Jo in Wyoming demonstrates how the Hoppers used automobiles as a mobile studio, with Jo in the front seat and Hopper in the back. Hopper,

Jo too, was inspired by the magniﬁcent landscape, which he depicted in two watercolors: Mount Moran and Slopes of Grand Teton. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd suggests that Jo in Wyoming tells of Hopper’s difﬁcult relationship with Jo, and of her need to assert independence within the marriage: “Jo’s presence in the car suggests her ability to escape the conﬁnes of the home, exploring different vistas.... Whereas automobile manufacturers’ advertisements suggested that the car would enhance women’s domestic efﬁciency, for Jo ... it symbolized her emancipation.” Jo’s desire to take the wheel put Hopper on edge, and many of their arguments centered on his refusal to allow her to drive. Fryd points out that in this painting Hopper shows Jo positioned, not in the driver’s seat, but on the passenger side. Yet Hopper was making progress. Ten years earlier, in Jo Painting, he had shown her close up, in proﬁle, her right arm extended, but with no paintbrush in view. In 1936 he stopped short of acknowledging his wife’s creative capacities; ten years later, in Jo in Wyoming, he portrayed her as a bona ﬁde artist. Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Jo Painting 1936. Oil on canvas, 18 ¥ 16 in. (45.7 ¥ 40.6 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This cropped scene does not live up to the painting’s title, since it shows only the head and shoulders of Jo Hopper in proﬁle. The right half of the canvas is taken up almost entirely by Jo’s thick, almost bushy auburn hair. The viewer is left imagining a paintbrush at the end of Jo’s raised arm. In 1938 Jo Hopper was invited to exhibit one of her oils, Cape Cod Hills, at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. “She had not shown her work since 1928,” notes curator Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, who adds that Jo was heartened when Edward agreed to include his Jo Painting in the same exhibition. Source: Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, “Josephine Nivison Hopper: Some Newly Discovered Works.”

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Jo

Jo Sketching at Good Harbor Beach* 7

1923 or 1924. Watercolor on paper, 13 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper shows a side view of his wife Jo Hopper sitting on a resort beach at Gloucester, Massachusetts. She is fully dressed; the wide brim of a straw hat completely hides her face. If it wasn’t for the title (assigned by the Whitney Museum of American Art subsequent to receiving the Hopper bequest), one might take this as depiction of a vacationer writing a postcard or letter. Hopper never makes it clear that his wife is an artist. Blues predominate, in Jo’s smock, in the water lapping the shore, and in the sky. The painting’s focal point is Jo’s hat, which leads the viewer’s eye to a ﬁnger of land reaching out into the harbor, on which two large structures stand in relief against the sky. Hopper uses a diagonal of blue water to divide the beach from this promontory. The painting is dated 1923 or 1924. If it was 1923, Hopper painted this scene while courting Jo. If it was 1924, he painted it during their honeymoon. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Watercolors of Edward Hopper.

Jo Sketching in the Truro House* 1934–38. Watercolor on paper, 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—Hopper began this painting after he and his wife Jo Hopper moved into their newly built South Truro, Cape Cod, house. It is a loosely rendered watercolor, most likely left unﬁnished. Other than the wooden chest (or table?) on which Jo sits, there is no furniture in the room; Hopper minimizes the need for further detail by using muted washes on the wall and ﬂoor. His side view shows Jo seated in front of the studio’s huge factory window (because the scene is cropped, we see only 12 of the 36 windowpanes). Jo is dressed in bright blue trousers and a whitish tee shirt, with a rust colored scarf at the neck. Her hair is tied back in a bun. She holds a sketchpad on her lap,

and seems completely engrossed in her drawing. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist.

Kent, Rockwell (1882–1971) Born in the same year as Hopper, Kent grew up in Tarrytown, New York, directly across the Hudson River from Hopper’s hometown of Nyack, New York. The two followed similar career paths: illustrator to printmaker to painter. In 1900 Kent attended Columbia University during the day, while taking night classes at the New York School of Art, where he and Hopper ﬁrst met. Studying under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Robert Henri, they often sat in the same classrooms. Kent admired Hopper’s work, dubbing him “the John Singer Sargent of the class.” In March 1908 a group of Henri students organized their own show, “Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists,” at the Harmonie Club in New York City. Another student friend of Hopper, Guy Pène du Bois, was the show’s chief publicist. Kent and Hopper were among the ﬁfteen artists represented. Henri urged his students to visit Monhegan, and Hopper met up with Kent during the summer of 1917. Hopper and Kent were the same age, and as artist and author Gerry Souter points out, Hopper “must have recognized their shared interest in the sea and the timeless energy of nature ... [and] might have seen his own future in Kent’s success as a print maker.” In 1927 Kent became Hopper’s neighbor at 3 Washington Square North, taking the studio apartment previously occupied by another friend and classmate, Walter Tittle. Kent’s liberal political views and risqué behaviors precluded any closer friendship between the two men, although they stayed connected through art. In 1946, when Kent and Hopper both exhibited in “Robert Henri and Five of His Pupils” at The Century Association in New York, art critic Helen Appleton Read placed this thought in the exhibition catalog: “Painting

75 as a vehicle for poetical and mystical ideas, rather than as an objective interpretation of nature, has been a constant characteristic of Rockwell Kent’s paintings and drawings.” The inner life, more than anything else, was where art began for both Kent and Hopper. Sources: (1) Bennard B. Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight (2) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (3) Helen Appleton Read, Robert Henri and Five of His Pupils.

Kroll, Leon (1884–1974) Hopper and Kroll both painted in Paris, France, before going on to become noted American realist artists. The two became acquainted in 1911 while exhibiting at the nonjuried, artist-organized show at the MacDowell Club in New York City. Kroll also became friendly with club members George Bellows, Robert Henri, Williams Glackens, George Luks and Ernest Lawson. He was two years younger than Hopper. Kroll later remembered that Hopper never made small talk with other club members, remaining on the fringe of the group. In 1912 Hopper and Kroll traveled together to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where they spent the summer painting. Kroll, who had studied at the Art Students League, followed a traditional approach—his scenes of Gloucester were picturesque and crowded with people. Hopper’s paintings were not only devoid of people, they were also becoming more solid in construction, more geometric and angular. Lloyd Goodrich remembers Hopper telling him of Kroll’s 1912 remark that the modernists would like the angles of Hopper’s houses and rocks, and that Hopper, distainful of modernism, was quick to add that back in 1912 he was still unaware of Cézanne and cubism, and that the angularity was just natural to him. Source: Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper.

Kuh, Katharine (1904–94) In My Love Affair with Modern Art, Kuh tells of entering Vassar College in 1921 intending to study economics. But after taking Alfred Barr’s class in Italian Renaissance art, she

Kuh changed her major to art history, and later earned her master’s degree at the University of Chicago. In 1935 she opened the Katharine Kuh Gallery in Chicago. In 1943 she joined the Art Institute of Chicago. She became its ﬁrst woman curator of modern painting and sculpture in 1954. Art historian Avis Berman assisted Kuh in bringing My Love Affair with Modern Art to publication. At one point, Kuh remembered her ﬁrst meeting with Hopper, in 1943 in Mexico: “This was his ﬁrst trip to Mexico, and he hated the whole experience—the dust, the opulent Baroque architecture, the colorful Indian pageantry, the smells, the food, the ebullient Latins.... The Hoppers had been in Mexico for less than two weeks when we met. They were lonely and urged me to have dinner with them at their hotel ... he explained that their summer house on Cape Cod was unavailable until fall ... and that he didn’t want to return to their New York apartment during the summer heat, so he was ‘stuck’ in Mexico.” Kuh advised the Hoppers to go by train to Saltillo. Arriving there, Hopper found the town more to his liking. Kuh later visited Hopper’s house and studio in South Truro, Cape Cod, which she describes as “stark, white, isolated high on a bluff above the sea, a house he had designed himself precisely as he wanted it.... The view was quite wonderful, with the sea spread out in a vast panorama unbroken by any intervening land.... The intense sunlight still haunts me, pouring in from all directions and also bouncing back from the sea with exaggerated intensity.” Kuh last saw Hopper the year before he died, and was shocked at his appearance: “He was shockingly bent over, especially the upper part of his body. That once commanding ﬁgure was having trouble supporting itself, the head heavy and drooping below the shoulders. He who had always gazed down was now peering up at me.” Source: Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator.

Ledger

ledger book Whenever Edward Hopper completed a work of art, he noted its details in a record book. Robert Henri, Hopper’s instructor at the New York School of Art, encouraged this practice. Beginning in 1913, Hopper began recording his sales in a standard 12 ¥ 71 ⁄ 2 inch hardcover account book, noting the cash he took in either from illustration or other sale of art. After 1924 and Hopper’s marriage to Josephine Nivison, the two collaborated in the task of keeping the books. Hopper’s role was to provide a scaled-down sketch of the artwork, its dimensions, materials (as, for instance, English linen canvas, domestic priming, or Windsor & Newton colors), and where and when it was completed. Jo Hopper recorded the exhibition history and/or sale price (including the art dealer’s commission) and provided a detailed description of the painting’s subject matter, ﬁgures, composition, use of color, and so forth. She and Hopper would sometimes work out a brief narrative for the painting. Jo liked to think of Hopper’s ﬁgures as characters in a play or movie; she sometimes used theatrical terminology such as “stage R.” or “off-stage L.” In 1968 Jo Hopper bequeathed the four ledger books to Lloyd Goodrich; in 1984 Goodrich donated them to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Source: Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work.

Lee Shore 1941. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 43 in. (71.8 ¥ 109.2 cm), Private Collection — In this painting, Hopper shows a gaff-rigged cutter sailing close haul into the wind. The sailboat is so huge that, astonishingly, it dwarfs an adjacent shorefront home. The painting’s title is also the title Herman Melville gave to Chapter 23 of Moby-Dick, a book Hopper read in the mid1930s. The chapter features Bulkington, who in appearance and behavior seems much like Hopper. Melville had introduced Bulkington in Chapter 3, describing him as “somewhat aloof ... he refrained from making as much noise as

76 the rest. This man interested me at once.... He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders ... the deep shadows of his eyes ﬂoated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy.... When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved.” In Chapter 23, Bulkington is at the helm of the Pequod. Hopper may have identiﬁed with Bulkington’s decision to turn into the wind. For years Hopper had avoided all safe and popular trends in art, risking everything to pursue his own artistic vision. As Melville points out in Chapter 23, “the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends.” Hopper surely identiﬁed with Melville’s praise of Bulkington: “Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea.” Source: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.

light “A certain slant of light was Edward Hopper’s thing,” art critic Holland Cotter observes, “[and] he made it our thing, hard-wired it into our American brains: white late-morning light scraping across a storefront; twilight, plangent with heat and regret, settling over a city; slabs of late-night lamplight chilling the walls of Lonely Hearts Hotels everywhere ... Hopper once said that, as an artist, the only thing he ever aspired to do was to paint ‘sunlight on the side of a house.’” Hopper began to explore the nature of light while on his trips to Paris, France (1906, 1909 and 1910), where he described the light as soft and luminous. By 1910 he was moving beyond the impressionist interpretation of light; his light was becoming clean, clear, unwavering, somewhat masculine, a light which sharpened and deﬁned his forms, giving them substance and weight. Hopper turned to etching in 1915; light and shadow became dominant motifs in the 1921 etchings Night in the Park, Night Shadows, and Evening Wind, and in almost all of his

77 watercolors and oils that followed. Then, in the 1930s, Hopper found the extraordinary light of Cape Cod and set out to capture its effects at different times of the day; in The Camel’s Hump and Cape Cod Afternoon we see a late afternoon sun. “Hopper’s concern with light often required him to return to subjects on multiple days,” notes curator Ellen E. Roberts, “since he could work only while the effect lasted.... He particularly favored late afternoon and early morning light, painting the long shadows the way the human eye actually sees them, as blocks of color.” As his career came closer to its end, sunlight became the real subject of many oils, as is evidenced by their titles: High Noon, Cape Cod Morning, Morning Sun, City Sunlight, South Carolina Morning, Sunlight on Brownstones, Sunlight in a Cafeteria, People in the Sun, Second Story Sunlight, A Woman in the Sun and, ﬁnally, Sun in an Empty Room. In a 1964 interview with Aline Saarinen, Hopper spoke about light: “I like the long shadows of early and late sunlight. I am very much interested in light, and particularly sunlight, trying to paint sunlight without eliminating the form under, if I can. It’s very difﬁcult to do. The form begins to obscure the light itself and destroy it ... I would like to do sunlight that was just sunlight in itself perhaps.” Sources: (1) Holland Cotter, “Hopper’s America, in Shadow and Light” (2) Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro” (3) Interview between Edward Hopper and Aline Saarinen.

Light at Two Lights 1927. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama — This is one of three watercolors by Hopper of the lighthouse at Two Lights, near Cape Elizabeth, Maine. The other two, with the same title, are located in the Whitney Museum of American Art. Each of the three works shows the lighthouse from a different vantage point. Of the three versions, the Montgomery Museum’s Light at Two Lights is the strongest. Hopper shows the lighthouse from below and

Light also includes a portion of the keeper’s house and attached sheds. He crops both the house and lighthouse tower to create a series of interesting forms, all dramatized with strong light and shadow. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg observes that the painting’s “lower area offers a sheer, smooth contrast with the jagged lines of the outbuildings and storage sheds.... The clean edges of the clapboard and the simple angles of the roof play off against the gingerbread trim on the roof of the keeper’s house.” Hopper’s most famous version of this scene is The Lighthouse at Two Lights, an oil, painted in 1929. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Light Battery at Gettysburg 1940. Oil on canvas: 181 ⁄8 ¥ 275 ⁄ 16 in. (46 ¥ 69.4 cm), The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Modern Art, Kansas City, Missouri — This is the last of ﬁve Hopper paintings to reference the Civil War; the others were Civil War Campground (1926), The Battery, Charleston, S.C.* (1929), Fort and Gun* (1929), and Dawn Before Gettysburg (1936). None of the paintings depict a battle scene. We know Hopper was fascinated by the Civil War. On his return trip from Charleston, South Carolina, in 1929, he and Jo Hopper had spent a day at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, and from there they made their way up to Gettysburg. There, Hopper surely saw the monument to the 13th Independent Battery— New York Light Artillery, and read its inscription. Perhaps this was when the idea for Light Battery at Gettysburg became planted in his mind. In Light Battery at Gettysburg, Hopper shows only the tail end of a line of a two-cannon section, only eight artillerymen and perhaps ﬁve horses, as they make their slow, methodical march toward a dark horizon. His stark treatment of light, particularly as it falls on the house and attached structures in the middle ground, further underscores the harsh reality of the troop’s uncertain and unenviable circumstances. We must assume there are many more

Lighthouse men and horses up ahead. The basic Union Army ﬁeld or light artillery unit was commanded by a captain and comprised four to six cannons with 25 to 30 men to a cannon. Batteries were divided into two-cannon sections, each under the command of a lieutenant. Each cannon was under the command of a sergeant. Horses pulled the cannons into battle on caissons; depending on the size of the battery and the number and size of the guns, there would be anywhere from 45 to 98 horses. This was too much for Hopper, who rarely inserted more than one or two ﬁgures into a painting. By showing two caissons, he gained a degree of historical accuracy. Anything more would have been, for him, unmanageable. Light Battery at Gettysburg was the ﬁrst Hopper painting that artist William Bailey ran across. He was then only 19, an art school student. Thirty-two years later, he recalled his reaction: “I didn’t like the painting at all.... It seemed terribly clumsy and boring ... there seemed to be no strong social theme. The drama of the Light Battery didn’t seem to be particularly important. It was a sunny day and there were these soldiers in blue suits with cannons, woods behind, and houses next to the road. There was nothing about the brushwork, there was nothing about the composition that seemed to me arresting. It was very clear, though, it was very simple, it was very homely, and it stuck with me.” Source: “Artists’ Panel: Joel Meyerowitz, George Segal, William Bailey, with Gail Levin, Moderator,” Art Journal.

The Lighthouse at Two Lights 1929. Oil on canvas, 291 ⁄2 ¥ 431 ⁄4 in. (74.9 ¥ 109.9 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — Hopper once told an interviewer that all he ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house. He more than achieved this goal in The Lighthouse at Two Lights, which features a 120-foot lighthouse, along with the keeper’s house and adjacent sheds. Hopper painted the scene in the late afternoon, when the sun at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, makes long shadows and creates a sharp con-

78 trast between the side of the lighthouse and the surrounding area. “The complex is dramatically silhouetted against the sky,” writes curator Janet L. Comey, “like a medieval fortress— proud and invulnerable.” Some contend that light and not the lighthouse is the focus of this painting, comparing Hopper’s approach to light to the work of Giorgio de Chirico. In The Nostalgia of the Inﬁnite (1911) de Chirico uses theatrical light on a large tower that strongly resembles the lighthouse in The Lighthouse at Two Lights. De Chirico’s scene, however, is created from imagination and has an artiﬁcial look—the viewer senses that no such tower exists. Hopper’s lighthouse, in contrast, is rooted in its place and time. The Lighthouse at Two Lights has become an iconic painting. Three years after Hopper’s death in 1967, this painting was reproduced on the six-cent postage stamp marking Maine’s sesquicentennial as a state. It was the ﬁrst image of a lighthouse on a United States stamp. Source: Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Lighthouse Hill 1927. Oil on canvas, 291 ⁄ 16 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (73.8 ¥ 102.2 cm), Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas — This is Hopper’s most dramatic portrayal of the lighthouse complex at Two Lights, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Standing in late afternoon shadows and silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky, the buildings stand in crisp detail. The landscape below is painted in dark rough swatches, the brush strokes still visible. Hopper chose a vantage point far beneath the lighthouse, his back to the water. The tall white structures loom forbiddingly; the mood is edgy, almost ominous. The darkened facade and windows of the keeper’s house are uninviting, and the gloom seems to roll down the hill toward the viewer. After taking in Lighthouse Hill at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1929, Forbes Watson wrote, “Mr. Hopper has rendered a striking solution in the chiaroscuro of hard sunlight

79

Locomotive

and deep shadow. There is lush green in the foreground and a colour gamut that runs from cool white to sky blue.”

ican art,” writes art critic Carl Little, adding that “it was Hopper who made of the lighthouse a representative and enduring American image.”

Source: Forbes Watson, “A Note on Edward Hopper.”

Sources: (1) Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine” (2) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

lighthouses Art historian Janet Comey notes that, prior to Hopper, lighthouses were deemed unworthy as subjects of art; Comey cites an art critic who in the 1920s included lighthouses in a list of “buildings which ordinarily seem to be of the ugliest varieties.” Hopper brought lighthouses into the realm of ﬁne art, an achievement noted in 2008 by the National Gallery of Art: “Full of intrigue and mystery, Hopper’s lighthouses surpass their utilitarianism and assume a commanding presence — no longer mere incidental structures like those in the seascapes of other artists.” Hopper’s ﬁrst lighthouse, painted in a small Cape Ann town near Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1912, was Squam Light. Hopper found his next subjects in Maine: Monhegan Lighthouse, an oil (1916–19), and The Lighthouse (1923), an etching with the alternate title Maine Coast. He returned to Cape Ann where he painted Eastern Point Light, a watercolor of a scene previously painted by Winslow Homer. Beginning in 1927, he went into high gear, completing six paintings of the Cape Elizabeth, Maine, lighthouse complex at Two Lights, the most notable being the watercolor Light at Two Lights* and the oils Lighthouse Hill and Captain Upton’s House. At nearby Portland Head that same year he produced three watercolors: Portland Head Light; Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head; Rocky Pedestal. In 1929 he completed two watercolors, Lighthouse Village and Pemaquid Light, and the oil that has become his best-known lighthouse painting, The Lighthouse at Two Lights. At Cape Cod, he produced the watercolor Highland Light, North Truro and two oils, The Long Leg and Five A.M. “New England provided Hopper with motifs which he would turn into icons of Amer-

The Locomotive 1923. Etching on copper. Platemark: 77 ⁄ 8 ¥ 9 ⁄ 16 in. (20 ¥ 25 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — Hopper shows a massive train engine poised at the mouth of a tunnel. The engine dwarfs the few railroad workmen standing nearby. Art historian Jennifer Roberts writes that Hopper “monumentalizes the steam engine while literally marginalizing and cutting off one ﬁgure standing at the left. The brightly lit overpass and darkened tunnel ahead exemplify Hopper’s symbolic use of light and architecture.” Roberts also notes “the vigorous crosshatching, deeply bitten lines, and heavy inking that are typical of Hopper’s etchings. The starkly white paper he speciﬁcally sought out, and the manner in which he wiped the ink on the copperplates, also contribute to the intensity of his chiaroscuro effects.” The Locomotive was one of the last etchings that Hopper produced. Later in 1923 he traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, met up with Josephine Nivison, and at her urging turned to painting in watercolor. Success came quickly. In 1937 the Carnegie Museum of Art staged a Hopper retrospective, exhibiting 32 oils, 53 watercolors and 11 etchings. The following year Childe Reece’s article “Edward Hopper’s Etchings” appeared in Art Magazine. “Mass and weight and raucous metal are conveyed by The Locomotive,” Reece wrote, “there is little glamour, little of the picturesque in the acid-bitten landscapes that shriek their ugliness to heaven but how real and unforgettable they are! ... Hopper is certainly not a romantic, neither is he a crass realist ... he plucks mystery from the commonplace ... had Hopper wished he might have been as great an etcher as he is a painter.” 13

Sources: (1) Jennifer Roberts, “Edward Hopper” (2) Childe Reece, “Edward Hopper’s Etchings.”

80

Lonely

The Lonely House 7

1923. Etching on copper. Platemark: 7 ⁄ 8 ¥ 97 ⁄ 8 in. (20 ¥ 25.1 cm), The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania—At the 2007 Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, art editor Greg Cook was stirred to write of Hopper’s “conﬁdent black and white etchings: tense couples, people alone in public, ladies gazing out windows, and, as he titled one print, The Lonely House. Here you see his penchant for odd striking angles and the dramatic light of Rembrandt’s prints.” In The Lonely House, one of his ﬁnal etchings, Hopper captures the melancholy of an apartment building standing alone in what seems to be a deserted urban neighborhood. He crops the building at the top, but establishes a sense of the structure’s scale by show ing the ﬁgures of two children playing on the ground alongside. Did the six foot, ﬁve inch Hopper project his own persona and sense of isolation into lonely houses? In 1925 he depicted another tall, forlorn structure in House by the Railroad; that same year he titled a watercolor of an apartment top “Self-Portrait,” before renaming it Skyline Near Washington Square. Source: Greg Cook, “Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper’s Master Works at the MFA.”

The Long Leg 1935. Oil on canvas, 20 ¥ 301 ⁄4 in. (50.8 ¥ 76.8 cm), Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California — Hopper often saw this scene from the window of his summer home in South Truro, Cape Cod. The Long Leg shows a gaff-rigged sloop hitting down the coast, and, at a distance, the lighthouse station at Long Point. Today, the two buildings remaining at the Long Point station, the light tower and the oil house, are under the supervision of the American Lighthouse Foundation; when the U.S. Postal Service debuted a postage stamp in 2009 with a cropped image of The Long Leg, the foundation issued this statement: “Edward Hopper ... repeatedly turned to lighthouses as

a subject. He was drawn ... not so much to their prettiness, but more to their moodiness and isolation. There’s a cool, still quality to his painting, The Long Leg, that makes it memorable.” Source: American Lighthouse Foundation, “New U.S. Postage Stamp has a Lighthouse Connection.”

The Louvre in a Thunderstorm 1909. Oil on canvas, 23 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (58.4 ¥ 73 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This was the most experimental of Hopper’s paintings on his third and ﬁnal trip to Paris, France. There is no detail on the darkened facade of the Louvre; the museum seems to crouch down in surrounding trees, as if menaced by the approaching storm. The only element shown in detail is a riverboat on the Seine. In keeping with the title, the sky is a roiling gray-blue and white. The left bank of the river, the river itself, and the foliage on the opposite bank are shown in a gray-green; anything built by man is in brown and black. Three diagonals draw the viewer’s eye to the left, where the storm is brewing. Scholar Rolf Günter Renner places The Louvre in a Thunderstorm on his list of Hopper works in which nature and civilization meet. The painting, Renner asserts, “showed Hopper marshalling his material in a way that became more important still in his middle and late periods: the natural and man-made worlds, culture and technology, all meet in the picture, and the different spheres are not only deﬁned—they are transformed. The Louvre, the symbol of civilization, is seen at a moment of natural menace, and is also practically hidden by tokens of the technological: the bridge and the boat.” Source: Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real.

The MacArthurs’ Home, “Pretty Penny” 1939. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 40 in. (73.6 ¥ 101.6 cm), Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts — Against his better judgment, and at the urging of his art dealer Frank Rehn and his wife Jo, Hopper accepted a commission to paint the Nyack, New York,

81 home of actress Helen Hayes and her husband, playwright Charles MacArthur. The house had a long history. Built in the 1850s and originally owned by Eli Gurnee, a retired merchant, it features a classic Italianate ﬂat roof with brackets and overhanging eaves, along with large columns that support front and rear porches. The rooftop widow’s perch provides a 180-degree view of the Hudson River. The home, falling into disrepair, stayed in the Gurnee family until 1932, when Hayes and MacArthur took it over. They decided to restore the house to its early glory, and almost went broke in the process. “I was in a radio series called The New Penny,” Hayes recalled years later, “I was working my head off to get some money ... we were pouring it all into this house. So a wag, a friend of my husband’s, called it ‘Pretty Penny.’” Hopper regretted taking the commission (and he never accepted another). Hayes recalled meeting with Hopper early on: “I guess I had never met a more misanthropic, grumpy, grouchy individual in my life ... I just shriveled under the heat of his disapproval.” Hopper told Hayes: “I can’t do this house. I don’t want to paint this house. It does nothing for me.... There’s no light and there’s no air that I can ﬁnd for that house.” Hayes was deﬂated: “We thought it was a real Hopper house.” Despite his angst, Hopper saw the project through. He worked from eight conté crayon preliminary drawings, and in the end produced a light-as-air view of the mansion. The MacArthurs paid $2,500 for the painting. After MacArthur died in 1956, Hayes continued to live in “Pretty Penny” until her death in 1993. The property had three owners over the next sixteen years, the most famous being comedienne Rosie O’Donnell. In April 2009, when ‘Pretty Penny’ was again up for sale, the asking price was $4,900,000. Sources: (1) “Six Who Knew Edward Hopper,” Art Journal (2) Nancy Cacioppo, “Pretty Penny Has Rich History.”

Macomb’s Dam Bridge 1935. Oil on canvas, 35 ¥ 603 ⁄ 16 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.9 cm), Brooklyn Museum, New York —

Maine Critics have been puzzled by Hopper’s omission of people in urban landscapes that seem to plead for them. Nowhere is this more evident than in Macomb’s Dam Bridge. Hopper chose for his subject the third oldest major bridge in New York City, and the oldest extant metal truss swing-type bridge. Macomb’s Dam Bridge was built between 1890 and 1895 to link Manhattan to the Bronx, which was slated to become a borough of New York City in 1898. This viaduct, spanning the Harlem River at 155th Street, won praise for its originality and boldness of design. The bridge’s 1,415-foot steel central swing span, shown by Hopper at the left, was then considered the world’s heaviest moveable mass. From the start, Bronx baseball fans crossed the bridge to root for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds and, after Yankee Stadium was built in 1923, additional human trafﬁc ﬂowed eastward. Hopper could not have missed the presence of the cars and people using the bridge. Hopper was not a baseball fan — his interest was in composition and color. Gail Levin notes that he made many preparatory sketches of the bridge in black and white, taking down notes each time on the way colors changed at different times of the day. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Maine Hopper, like many other artists, was attracted to Maine by its isolation and unspoiled natural beauty. Between 1914 and 1929 he spent nine summers in Maine visiting Ogunquit, Monhegan Island, Rockland and Cape Elizabeth. “Virtually all of Hopper’s Maine paintings, in both oils and watercolor, were completed en plein air,” art historian Janet Comey notes, “as opposed to the invented outdoor subjects of his later years.” In Ogunquit in the summer of 1914, Hopper ran into his future wife, the artist Josephine Nivison. Ogunquit was a small ﬁshing village in south Maine surrounded by three miles of rugged coast. Nearby was Prout’s Neck where, for many years, Winslow Homer

Manhattan hid away and painted. Painting in oils, Hopper was proliﬁc: Sea at Ogunquit; Cove at Ogunquit; Dories in a Cove*; The Dories, Ogunquit; Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit; Square Rock, Ogunquit; Road in Maine. Hopper returned to Ogunquit in 1915, joining with Robert Henri, George Bellows and Leon Kroll, who were summering there. Unfortunately Ogunquit was enveloped in fog that summer and Hopper, unable to paint outdoors, spent his time sketching scenes that he would later used as the basis for etching. In 1916, Hopper made his third visit to Maine, this time at Monhegan, an island scarcely one square mile in area. The island had miles of trails, often steep and strenuous, leading to the highest ocean cliffs on the Maine coastline. That summer, and in subsequent summers, Hopper turned out over two dozen oils picturing Monhegan’s rocky shoreline. In 1917 Hopper became reacquainted with Jo Nivison, and their friendship began to deepen. Hopper did no painting in 1917; instead, he again made a number of sketches, later turning some of them into etchings. Comey thinks The Monhegan Boat was the best of the lot. Edward and Jo Hopper returned to Maine in 1926 as a married couple. Hopper painted more than twenty-ﬁve watercolors during the seven-week stay: two of houses, Haunted House (abandoned and boarded up) and Talbot’s House (a Second Empire house with mansard roof ); four of the lime-rock industry, including Lime Rock Railroad; one of Rockland Harbor; several of trawlers in the shipyard, including Schooners’ Bow Sprit, an image of a derelict vessel. One unusual scene for Hopper, notes Comey, was “a domestic interior he titled Mrs. Acorn’s Parlor, undoubtedly a corner of the living room in Mrs. Asenath H. Achorn’s boardinghouse at 17 Lindsey Street in Rockland, where the Hoppers probably stayed.” Hopper also painted Civil War Campground, a view of Tillson’s Hill where ten companies of volunteers from the Rockland area camped in 1861 before departing for the South. In 1927 the sale of Two on the Aisle for $1,500 enabled Hopper to purchase his ﬁrst

82 automobile —a used 1925 Dodge. That summer Edward and Jo Hopper drove to Two Lights, in Cape Elizabeth, south of Portland, where Hopper was captivated by lighthouses, the Coast Guard station, boats and docks, Victorian houses, churches, rocky coastline, quiet coves. He painted Cars and Rocks*; Foreshore —Two Lights; Lighthouse Hill; Captain Upton’s House; Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine; House of the Fog Horn I; House of the Fog Horn II; and Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head. In nearby Portland he found additional subjects: Libby House, Portland; Custom House, Portland; and Pemaquid Light. The Hoppers made their ﬁnal visit to Maine in 1929 where, at Cape Elizabeth, Hopper produced Coast Guard Station; House of the Fog Horn III; and The Lighthouse at Two Lights. Source: Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Manhattan Bridge Loop 1928. Oil on canvas, 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts—Hopper painted Manhattan Bridge Loop in his studio, working from preliminary sketches (crayon, charcoal and watercolor) done at the spot where the Manhattan Bridge descends into Manhattan at Canal Street. The painting, at the time his largest after Soir Bleu, shows a wall and walkway sweeping across the length of the canvas, overpowering the verticals: steel arches, lamppost, and buildings. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd stresses the “urban emptiness, alienation and loneliness” of Manhattan Bridge Loop, as personiﬁed by the tiny ﬁgure in the green overcoat: “Here a solitary man walks along a barren loop with slumped shoulders, lost in thought, and both physically and psychologically removed from the apartment buildings and industrial bridge in the background. Hopper claimed that he created ‘a very long horizontal shape of this picture ... to give a sensation of great lateral extent ... and to make one conscious of the

83 spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself.’” Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and The Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

The Mansard Roof 1923. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Brooklyn Museum, New York — During his 1909 stay in Paris, France, Hopper included a mansard roof in two of his oils, Le Pavillon de Flore and Le Pont Royal. François Mansart introduced the mansard roof, which dates back to the 16th century, in France. It is a hip roof with two pitches, a ﬂatter pitch on top and a much steeper pitch on the sides. This makes maximum use of the attic’s interior space. At that time buildings in Paris were taxed on their height calculated from the ground to the start of the roof. By choosing a mansard roof, owners could get an additional ﬂoor, tax-free. The Mansard Roof is considered to be one of Hopper’s ﬁnest paintings, and was the ﬁrst to be entered into a museum collection. This came about largely through the efforts of his future wife, Josephine Nivison. An emerging talent, she had been invited to show six watercolor paintings in a November 1923 group exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. After accepting the invitation, she spoke to the curators about Hopper’s Gloucester, Massachusetts, watercolors. The curators knew only of Hopper’s etchings; at Nivison’s urging they agreed to look at the watercolors, and were impressed. The museum accepted six Hoppers and hung them next to Nivison’s work. The critics said nothing about Jo’s watercolors, but were ecstatic about Hopper. The New York Tribune’s Royal Cortissoz found Hopper’s watercolors “exhilarating ... we rejoice that he is using the medium.” Others were equally enthusiastic. Helen Appleton Read, art critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, likened Hopper’s paintings to those of Winslow Homer, stressing their “authority of big, simple forms.... What vitality and force and directness! Observe what can be done with the homeliest subject if only one possesses the seeing eye. A yel-

Marriage low frame house of the ordinary suburban model or an 1890 mansion of the mansard roof type is not exactly paintable if seen as such. But Mr. Hopper shows us the mansard mansion with a gale almost blowing its awnings away, the whole merely an excuse on which to hang an exposition of clear, bright, wind swept atmosphere.” The Mansard Roof was a highlight of the exhibition, and in December the Brooklyn Museum purchased the painting for $100. Hopper had found his stride. Over the next several years, he painted other mansard roofs, in watercolor (Haskell’s House and Talbot’s House) and in oils (House by the Railroad and The Bootleggers). Sources: (1) Royal Cortissoz, “Charming Water Colors and Drawings” (2) Helen Appleton Read, “Brooklyn Museum Emphasizes New Talent in Initial Exhibition.”

marriage In the summer of 1924, after a year-long courtship, Hopper wanted to take Jo Nivison back to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for another round of painting. Jo demurred, suggesting they go to Cape Cod to be with people she knew at art colonies and theater groups there. They struck a deal: Jo agreed to Gloucester, but only if they were ﬁrst married. They tied the knot at Eglise Evangelique on West 16th Street in New York City, with Hopper’s good friend Guy Pène du Bois as best man. Edward and Jo found that they were much alike in lifestyle preferences and in cultural interests. Each had attended the New York School of Art, studying under Robert Henri. Both valued creativity over creature comforts. Accustomed to limited incomes, they were frugal to the point of penny-pinching. They read and discussed books, frequented the movies, attended New York theater and continued their premarital habit of reciting French poetry to one another. Their tastes may have matched, but not their temperaments. He was slow in movement and in speech, saying little to Jo and even less in social settings; she was lively and never

Marshall’s at a loss for words. He had a tendency to retreat into himself, especially at the start of a new painting; she wanted to share her feelings at all times. One ongoing conﬂict, never resolved, was Jo’s desire to take the wheel of their automobile; Hopper was adamantly opposed. Jo’s ever-present sense of grievance on this and other issues spilled over at times into verbal tirades. The two worked out their frustrations in differing ways. Jo vented her feelings in diary entries and in phone calls and letters to friends (documenting what she saw as her husband’s disagreeable and even abusive behav ior). Hopper recorded his grievances, not in writing, but in art. He painted couples who appear distant, (Cape Cod Evening, Room in New York, and Hotel by a Railroad), anxious (Summer Evening, Four Lane Road) or depressed (Summer in the City, Sea Watchers, Excursion into Philosophy). More than anything, it was Hopper’s paintings that held them together. Jo understood her husband’s frequent struggle to ﬁnd subjects to paint, and did what she could to inspire him. In a letter to a friend, she called Hopper the center of her universe; she referred to her husband’s paintings as the children they never had. The art sometimes helped the two of them to be as playful as children; they discussed narratives, gave names to the ﬁgures in the paintings, laughed over different titles, and collaborated at the end: for the ledger book entry, Hopper would create a sketch of the scene and Jo would enter details and annotations. All marriages are complicated, and no two marriages are ever the same. After a series of interviews with the Hoppers in the 1960s, Brian O’Doherty wrote that the couple’s marriage “expressed an odd combination of tenderness, anger, rivalry, rejection, dependency.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Marshall’s House 1932. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut—Hopper takes

84 this matter-of-fact Cape Cod house and, with his an uncharacteristically vibrant palette, turns it into a strong composition, with the roof in bright earth red and raw sienna, windows and doorway in dark green and a section of the exterior wall in yellow ochre. The house, trimmed in white, presents its clapboard side to the sun, creating a strong shadow from one chimney. Running across the bottom quarter of the painting is swath of timothy grass rendered in varying shades of yellow. More than anything, it is Hopper’s light that energizes what might otherwise be a mundane scene. When this painting was exhibited in “Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Oils, Watercolors, Etchings” at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, art critic John Canaday noted that the “light of Hopper’s landscapes, so ﬂat yet so soft, so soft yet so clear, so vibrant yet so deﬁned, a light in which objects are revealed as solid and static (reversing every impressionist quality) is the light you step back into when you leave the museum.” Source: John Canaday, “Travelogue: A Doubleheader Down East.”

The Martha McKeen of Wellﬂeet 1944. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm), The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain — To commemorate his sailing experiences at Cape Cod with Martha and Reggie McKeen, Hopper in August began this painting of a gaff-rigged sloop heading out to open waters, completing it in the fall in his Washington Square North studio. The painting’s title caused confusion; some thought the boat was called The Martha McKeen. Hopper explained no boat was so named, that he was simply attempting to thank the McKeens for taking him sailing in Wellﬂeet Harbor, a few miles south of their Truro summer home. The painting shows a clear late August morning off Cape Cod. Two men are setting off in a small sloop. They pass in front of a sandbar much the same color as the sloop’s large sail; on the sandbar are ten seagulls lined up almost in regimental precision. Art critic Robert Hughes praised The Mar-

85 tha McKeen of Wellﬂeet when it was shown in Hopper’s 1980 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art: “It’s all there,” he wrote, “fragile but immemorial, as permanent as the way the gulls on the sandspit face into the light.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper (2) Robert Hughes, Nothing If Not Critical.

Martin, Steve (b. 1945) Steve Martin, the American actor, comedian, writer and composer, is a collector of 20th century art; in addition to two Hoppers, he has collected the art of Georges Seurat, Georgia O’Keeffe, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, and Helen Frankenthaler, among others. Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, writes that Martin “has collected paintings, drawings, prints and photographs for thirty years. The comedian is serious about art, and he’s knowledgeable, too.” Martin’s special afﬁnity for Hopper may have been sparked when he won the lead role in Pennies from Heaven; the 1981 ﬁlm featured two carefully recreated scenes based on Hopper’s Nighthawks and New York Movie. In 1988 Martin purchased Hopper’s Captain Upton’s House, and in 1999 he paid $10,000,000 for Hopper’s Hotel Window (later selling it for a sizeable proﬁt). In 2001 an exhibition titled “The Private Collection of Steve Martin” was mounted at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas. James Mann, curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum, praised Martin’s taste as a collector, commenting that Martin “does not hesitate to place emerging, younger artists along with 20th-century masters, even a few artists who have been underappreciated and obscure.” All of Martin’s young artists were Americans; later that year, Southwest Art quoted Martin from the Bellagio exhibition catalog: “I have always wondered whether Europeans view Hopper in the same way that Americans do. He seems to perfectly capture the Yankee heart, painting America with the parts Norman Rockwell left

Marty out: brooding, loneliness, sexual tension, the silence left in the day after all the hard work is done.” Martin is now recognized as an advocate of the arts. He is a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2005 he pledged $1 million to The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. When the National Gallery of Art produced a 30-minute video to accompany the 2007 opening of the Edward Hopper retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it asked Martin to be the narrator. Sources: (1) Christopher Knight, “Steve Martin’s True Heaven” (2) Kimberly McGee, “Eye for Art: Steve Martin’s Prized Painting Collection Gets a Critical Look” (3) Steve Martin, “Thoughts on Art.”

Marty Welch’s House 1928. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Thune — Here, bright sunlight splashes up against the front of a white house and its side porch and awnings. “Hopper used a vertical streetlight to bring the viewer close to the house,” notes curator Virginia Mecklenburg, adding that “the strong diagonals of the roof and awnings activate the front and side facades.... With shutters thrown open, the house feels receptive, and the awnings tie the bright face of contemporary taste with the late nineteenth-century architecture.” For Hopper, houses were important symbols of American culture. Whenever he inserted the name of a house owner in a painting’s title, he was paying tribute to earlier times. Mecklenburg points out that in this painting Hopper “linked the house and the man with the quiet days before the beam trawlers had replaced graceful sailing ships.” Martin “Marty” Leander Welch was a hero in Gloucester, Massachusetts; in 1920, against impossible odds, he won the $4,000 prize in the International Fisherman’s Schooner Championship race between his boat, the Esperanto and the Delawana of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Mendes

Mendes, Sam (b. 1965) Film director Sam Mendes is motivated by Hopper’s art. Mendes’s Road to Perdition (2002), writes ﬁlm critic Walter Chaw, is a “running homage to the images, themes, even favorite subjects of American painter Edward Hopper.” The ﬁlm’s Hopperesque touches include an all-night diner in the middle of nowhere, an unevenly lit apartment, and silhouettes imprisoned in blocks of yellow light. “Mendes is haunted,” notes ﬁlm historian Ray Zone, “by Hopper’s 1939 painting New York Movie, an evocation of actions and emotions that are never revealed ... Hopper’s modernist instincts led him to visually convey the theatrical device of silence and the unspoken.... The modernist tenet that ‘less is more’ applies equally to cinema and painting. Withholding information is often a very effective strategy for generating emotional impact. ‘Sometimes you know more about emotional states of characters if you can’t see their eyes,’ Mendes submits.” Sources: (1) Walter Chaw, “Road to Perdition” (2) Ray Zone, “A Master of Mood.”

Méryon, Charles (1821 –68) No one knew more about Hopper and etching than Carl Zigrosser, who served as curator of prints at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “Hopper became interested in printmaking,” Zigrosser wrote in 1962, “through his great admiration for the etchings of Méryon. For Hopper, Méryon is the great master of light on the solid surface of buildings.” Hopper ﬁrst encountered Méryon’s art during his Paris, France, sojourns; art historian Elliot Bostwick Davis notes that Méryon “probably inﬂuenced his selection of architectural features — bridges, viaducts, doorways, as well as elevated perspectives on rooftops below — after he returned to New York.” Late in his career, Hopper told art historian Brian O’Doherty that Méryon was one of the few artists he admired. O’Doherty senses that both Hopper and Méryon shared “the same obsession with architecture and light. Hopper recalled that one

86 of his favorite Méryon etchings, The Street of the Weavers, had “marvelous rendition of sunlight ... romantic sunlight.” Sources: (1) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper” (2) Elliot Bostwick Davis, “Hopper’s Foundation” (3) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art

Methodist Church Tower 1930. Watercolor on paper, 25 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (63.5 ¥ 50.2 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut — Hopper painted this scene from the back seat of his car on Main Street in Provincetown, the furthermost town on Cape Cod. The church tower rises above the neighboring housetops; Hopper achieves a striking geometric pattern featuring triangles and trapezoids, forms that would reappear in many of his later paintings. “In a relatively unusual manner,” writes curator Virginia Mecklenburg, “he was careful to delineate clapboard surfaces, roof tiles, shutter slats, and the moldings of the several levels of the church’s tower.” In January 1976 American Artist put out a special issue, “Portrait of America,” showcasing paintings by Albert Bierstadt, John Steuart Curry, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Eastman Johnson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and John Sloan. The full color cover image chosen by the magazine’s editors was Hopper’s Methodist Church Tower. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Mexico In June of 1943, because of World War II rationing, the Hoppers could not ﬁnd enough gasoline to motor up to Cape Cod for the summer. Instead, they took a train to Mexico City. At ﬁrst it seemed a mistake. Mexico City was not to their liking: they thought it expensive, they knew no Spanish, and they found the food was too spicy. Hopper had planned to paint outdoors in watercolor, but now was unable to settle on a subject. Out for a stroll in Mexico City in late July, the Hoppers chanced upon Katharine Kuh, art historian and curator

87 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Kuh, who had vacationed in Mexico for several years, suggested they take the train to Saltillo. There, Hopper found subjects more to his liking. Among the watercolors he completed were Palms at Saltillo; Saltillo Rooftops; Sierra Madre at Saltillo; Saltillo Mansion. Late in August the Hoppers traveled to Monterrey, where he painted Monterrey Cathedral and Sierra Madre at Monterrey. The Hoppers made four more trips to Mexico. In 1946 they returned to Saltillo, this time by car. Hopper completed four watercolors: El Palacio; Church of San Esteban; Construction, Saltillo; Roofs, Saltillo*. A 1951 trip to Saltillo was a disappointment; Hopper was unable to paint because of unusual heat and heavy rain. In 1953 they motored to Guanajuato, where Hopper painted Cliffs near Mitla, Oaxaca and Mountains at Guanajuato. The Hoppers’ ﬁnal trip to Mexico in 1955 was unproductive; feeling weak and tired, Hopper was unable to paint. Some years later, Kuh recounted her meeting with Hopper in Mexico. In retrospect, she ascribed Hopper’s initial dislike of Mexico to the fact that “it was all too sensuous for him; he was sixty-one at the time,” and accustomed to “the cool light and laconic Yankee reserve of New England.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places (2) Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art.

The Monhegan Boat 1918. Etching on copper. Platemark: 7 ¥ 9 in. (17.8 ¥ 22.9 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—Hopper spent the summers of 1916, 1917 and 1918 at Monhegan Island, Maine, where he made dozens of sketches. Back at his Washington Square North studio, he used these drawings when he turned to etching. The Monhegan Boat shows warmly dressed passengers huddled on the Port Clyde–Monhegan Island ferry. Poet and art critic Carl Little writes that The Monhegan Boat “captures the open air experience.... The etched lines are loose, yet precise, the composition made dynamic by the prow of a lifeboat on the ferry’s deck and by

Moonlight the sails of a ghostly sailboat passing in the background.” Art historian Janet Comey points out that “Hopper seemed to like the print, for he exhibited it frequently over the next several years— at the MacDowell Club, Art Institute of Chicago, Art Gallery of Toronto, and even the National Academy of Design. His paintings had not yet been accepted ... but his etchings were approved by juries and became his ﬁrst success.” In 2005, a signed and dated print of The Monhegan Boat was sold at auction for $90,000. Sources: (1) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England (2) Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Monterrey Cathedral 1943. Watercolor on paper, 213 ⁄ 4 ¥ 305 ⁄ 16 inches (55.2 ¥ 77 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—The Catedral Metropolitana de Nuestra Señora de Monterrey, completed in 1788, is a blend of baroque, neoclassic and Mexican churrigueresque (elaborately decorative detailing and the inclusion of stucco and statuary elements). The cathedral has 5 naves, 14 chapels and, underneath, a number of catacombs. Hopper chose the cathedral as his ﬁnal subject for during his ﬁrst stay in Mexico. He sets the cathedral and its adjacent domed chapel against rugged mountains in the distance, and also shows rooftops, a palm tree, and a hotel sign. Source: Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places.

Moonlight Interior 1921 –23. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Private Collection — Hopper takes us into an upper ﬂoor apartment bedroom. A woman, fully nude, climbs into bed, lit by the moonlight streaming through a tall window. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd asserts that Moonlight Interior “recalls the Ashcan [School] sense of spontaneity and intimacy, dark palette and ﬂuid brushwork, closely cropped compositions, and sexualized imagery of working class girls.” In several of his pre-1921 etchings, Hopper

Morning had pictured women in what Fryd describes as “candid bedroom scenes.” Hopper admitted to the connection between his prints and paintings such as Moonlight Interior, noting that after he turned to etching his paintings seemed to fall into place. The scene outside the window takes up half the canvas, and thus competes with the image of the woman. It had been a dozen years since Hopper had painted in France, and yet Moonlight Interior, with its overlarge windows and a view of a gabled house across the way, is evocative of a Parisian scene. Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Morning in a City 1944. Oil on canvas, 445 ⁄16 ¥ 5913 ⁄16 in. (112.5 ¥ 152 cm), Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts — What motivated Hopper to paint this large-scale bedroom scene of a woman standing before an open window, naked to the world except for the towel she holds? She looks out into the city but seems cut off, lost in thought. The setting, like the woman, is undeﬁned: the walls are bare and there is no furniture aside from the unmade bed. When New York Times art critic John Canaday saw Morning in a City on exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1961, he found it to be a “wonderful picture.” His description: “Hopper shows us a tough-bodied young woman with an ordinary, snub-nosed face, standing naked — a more appropriate word here than ‘nude’— in a small bedroom ﬁlled with early light. Her window frames some near-tenements across the street, a typical Hopper cityscape within the context of the total picture. Hopper of all painters has taken the commonest aspect of contemporary America and has invested it with poetry not by romanticizing it but by declaring the simple legitimacy of existence. His unidealized, thoroughly commonplace young woman has the same ﬂat but deep validity that Hopper can ﬁnd in a row of ugly houses. Devoid of all superﬁcial appeal, of any individuality, not even touching, expecting no conces-

88 sions in a world that offers none, she has the one great strength of honesty.” Source: John Canaday, “Realistic Paintings Go on View Today.”

Morning Sun 1952. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (71.4 ¥ 101.9 cm), Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio — Reviewing Hopper’s solo exhibition at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, in 1971, art critic Diana Loercher named Morning Sun “one of the ﬁnest works in the show ... a young woman sits on the bed staring impassively out an apartment window. She is silhouetted against a wall that is completely bare except for a patch of light. The starkness of this work ... suggests vividly an oppressive isolation in which people seem no more animated than the objects that surround them ... many of his ﬁgures are posed in relation to windows, to give the impression that they are cut off from the outside or the inside.” Hopper was approaching age 70 when he completed this painting. “Despite the ‘summertime’ mood of the picture,” writes artist Walter Garver, “it was painted in February in his New York City studio.” Jo Hopper, then age 68, modeled the scantily clad woman. Garver points out that Morning Sun took shape in stages: “The ﬁrst sketches show a woman sitting on the edge of a bed, close to a window. In later drawings, Hopper gradually moved her back into the center of the bed until the shaded areas of her head and back formed a dark shape against the sun-drenched wall.” Art curator Carter Foster notes that, in the more ﬁnished preliminary study and in the oil itself, Hopper substitutes a mask-like face for that of his wife. Sources: (1) Diana Loercher, “Hopper’s Windows Overlook Maine” (2) Walter Garver, “Edward Hopper: Master of Light and Mood” (3) Carter E. Foster, “Edward Hopper: Drawing into Painting.”

Mount Moran 1946. Watercolor on paper, 203 ⁄ 4 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (52.7 ¥ 72.4 cm), Private Collection — Mount Moran is near the guest ranch where

89 the Hoppers stayed for ten days on their way home from their trip to Mexico; the mountain is named in honor of Thomas Moran, the American western frontier landscape artist. Mount Moran is one of the few landscapes in which Hopper fails to include a manmade element. He renders this scene in soft blues, greens and yellows. In 2001, Mount Moran was auctioned off at Christie’s New York for $501,000, including fees. Mary Manion, writing in Antique Trader, commented on the sale: “The watercolor ... is consistent with his indifferent response to the West. More pictorial and illustrative and less likely to provoke mystery, Hopper’s rendering of the snow-capped Wyoming mountain range is nonetheless well done.” Manion felt that half a million dollars was “a remarkable sum for a painter whose primary source of inspiration was to be found more in rooftops than mountain peaks.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places (2) Mary Manion, “Art Markets: Celebrating Hopper.”

Mouth of Pamet River — Full Tide 1937. Watercolor on paper, 20 ¥ 281 ⁄ 4 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.8 cm), Private Collection — Traveling the three miles over to the oceanside at Cape Cod, Hopper began working early in the morning, hoping to catch this scene at ﬂood tide. In the foreground we see an expanse of marsh grass rendered in shades of yellow, orange and brown, and then the back of an offwhite house with a brown roof and seven brown rectangles representing windows. Just beyond the house, running the length of the painting, is a grayish railway embankment. The Pamet River ﬂows by the house and it broadens just before entering the Atlantic. All this is set against an early morning sky taking up the painting’s top half. Earlier, Hopper had painted the same house in House with a Rain Barrel, but that composition was close up, the architecture shown in detail. Rain Barrel is bright in color; the house stands in full sunlight, inviting and accessible. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg asserts that “the light of the sky, the muted tonalities

Mrs. of the grasses, and the mirror-like surface of the water” all combine to produce “a study in subtly modulated color.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

moviegoing Hopper attended many dozens of silent ﬁlms during his years as an illustrator, when he was paid to create movie posters. Shortly after Hopper gave up illustration, “talkies” came on the scene, and from that point on he was a conﬁrmed moviegoer. He loved the interiors of the ornate movie houses of the 1920s and 1930s. Noting that Hopper’s work “returns again and again to the subject of audiences watching movies,” art historian Erica Doss writes of “an early grisaille of about 1903,” Solitary Figure in a Theater*, in which “Hopper painted a solitary patron seated before what is either a movie screen or a stage.... In another painting, New York Movie, he further analyzes the participatory aspects of movie culture.... These works, in which Hopper depicts the movie audience, are not derived so much from the ﬁlms themselves ... as they are an interpretation of the social meaning of movie culture.” In time, the pendulum swung the other way, as ﬁlmmakers began to take notice of Hopper’s use of cinematic effects. Alfred Hitchcock used House by the Railroad in Psycho (1960), as did Terrence Malick in Days of Heaven (1978). In director Herbert Ross’s Pennies from Heaven (1981) we see Steve Martin in a re-creation of the diner in Nighthawks. More recently, director Wim Wenders ﬁlmed Don’t Come Knocking (2006), set in Butte, Montana, as a tribute to Edward Hopper. Source: Erica Doss, “Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir.”

Mrs. Scott’s House 1932. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 501 ⁄ 2 in. (66 ¥ 128.3 cm), Maier Museum of Art, RandolphMacon Women’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia — Mrs. Scott was one of Hopper’s Cape Cod neighbors. He shows her house situated in a gently undulating space among grassy

New hills. The late afternoon sun highlights the yellow-green grass, giving the hilltop a pinkish glow that calls to mind the palette of an earlier work, Corn Hill. In both paintings Hopper emphasizes the curvilinear design of the hills and the extraordinary Cape Cod light. Gregory Dicum writes that people living in Truro feel the light in Cape Cod “has color.... Blues are more blue, reds are more red. It’s similar to the south of France: the luminosity is so refractive; sea and sky mirror one another.” In 1935, Mrs. Scott’s House was exhibited in the 130th Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and won the prestigious Temple Gold Medal for the best picture painted in oil, without regard to subject. In announcing the award, a New York Times art critic described the painting: “A sinking sun casts shadows across a series of golden and green treeless hills on one of which rests a small, red-roofed gray house.” Sources: (1) Gregory Dicum, “Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light” (2) “New York Artists Win Three Awards,” The New York Times.

New York City Hopper once told an interviewer that New York City was “the American city that I know best and like most.” Hopper’s relationship with his adopted city began in 1899 when, as a seventeen-year-old, he commuted by ferry from Nyack, New York, to study at the New York School of Illustrating and then at the New York School of Art. Early paintings reveal his interest in what he saw on his commute: Ferry Slip* (1904–06), Rooftops of Ferry Slip* (1904– 06), Street Scene with Pedestrians* (1906). Hopper began to put down roots in Manhattan when, in September of 1904, he rented a small studio space on 14th Street. He took up residency in the city in 1910 when he leased a studio on East 59th Street. In 1913 he moved to 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, where he remained for ﬁfty-four years. He died at that address in 1967. New York is a people watcher’s paradise and Hopper took full advantage as he strolled the city streets and rode the elevated trains. He

90 took up etching in 1915 and produced memorable cityscapes: The El Station; People in the Park (1919–23); House Tops, Night on the El Train; Night Shadows; Night in the Park. Hopper also pictured New York City’s bridges, buildings and parks: Blackwell’s Island; New York Corner; East River; Apartment Houses; New York Pavements; Drug Store; Manhattan Bridge (1925); Manhattan Bridge* (1925 or 1926); The Lily Apartments (1926); Manhattan Bridge Entrance (1926); Manhattan Bridge Loop; From Williamsburg Bridge; Blackwell’s Island (1928); Early Sunday Morning; Apartment Houses, Harlem River; House at Dusk; Shakespeare at Dusk; The Circle Theatre; Macomb’s Dam Bridge; Bridle Path; Summertime; August in the City; Approaching a City; Sunlight on Brownstones; Queensborough Bridge. Hopper’s interiors show New Yorkers in their apartments, at places of work, and out at eateries or theaters: Solitary Figure in a Theater*; Girl at a Sewing Machine; New York Interior; New York Restaurant; Eleven A.M.; Two on the Aisle; Automat; Night Windows; Chop Suey; Room in New York; Tables for Ladies; Barber Shop; Room in Brooklyn; The Sheridan Theatre; New York Movie; Ofﬁce at Night; Girlie Show; Nighthawks; Conference at Night; Morning in a City; Summer in the City; First Row Orchestra; Morning Sun; City Sunlight; Sunlight in a Cafeteria; Intermission; New York office. When Hopper wasn’t out and about, he painted views from his Greenwich Village apartment window: City Roofs; Roofs, Washington Square; Skylights (1926); Rooftops* (1926); The City; My Roof (1928); Skyline Near Washington Square; November, Washington Square. None of these paintings includes a human ﬁgure. In the year Hopper died, 1967, his friend Lloyd Goodrich wrote this: “Hopper’s central theme is the city itself.... He has realized to the full the pictorial possibilities of New York: the character and forms of individual buildings, their physical materials, and the varying effects of light on them; storefronts, cafeterias,

91 theaters; common urban objects such as lampposts and ﬁre hydrants; the city’s many windows, and the visual phenomena of light seen through them, looking both in and out; the city at night, with its interplay of varicolored lights and ominous shadows. He is not interested in the obvious spectacularity of New York, its skyscrapers and its skyline, its rushing trafﬁc. There are no crowds in his cityscapes, no hurrying tide of people. He is concerned more with the monumental character of the city, with its changing lights and moods, and with its more intimate aspects, the immediate surroundings of the city-dweller.” Sources: (1) Interview between Edward Hopper and Arlene Jacobowitz (2) Lloyd Goodrich, “Edward Hopper.”

New York Corner, or Corner Saloon 1913. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Private Collection—Here, Hopper is beginning to shed the inﬂuence of French impressionism. On its surface, this New York City street scene is remindful of Paris, France: a misty day, a corner saloon, and a cluster of people dressed in black near a newspaper kiosk. And yet, critics detect the seeds of Hopper’s mature style. Art historian Avis Berman points to the “obliquely angled wedge of the corner saloon and trolley tracks ... the red brick buildings ... [and] one of his favorite vertical forms in the guise of a lamppost.” And art historian Samuel Green argues that “Corner Saloon ... has the static and impressive simplicity of his later pictures, as well as their ﬁne painterly quality and their curious lack of emotional involvement. The austerity of such a painting stands out in the midst of the lively genre of the ‘Ashcan’ School from which, as a pupil of [Robert] Henri, Hopper actually emerged.” Hopper exhibited New York Corner, along with Soir Bleu, in a 1915 group show at the MacDowell Club in New York City. Critics derided Soir Bleu, calling it a French fantasy, but they looked more kindly on the way New York Corner captured a typical Manhattan scene. This was an important lesson for Hopper; he never again exhibited Soir Bleu, and

New spent the next ten years working out his own style. Sources: (1) Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York (2) Samuel M. Green, American Art: A Historical Survey.

New York Interior 1921. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Along with New York Restaurant (c. 1922), New York Interior is one of Hopper’s last paintings to show French inﬂuences. He uses Degas-like framing and cropping, and a ﬁgure that resembles a Degas dancer in the act of mending her costume. Hopper, like Degas, intrudes upon an intimate setting. “If Hopper had any tie with Degas,” art critic Donald Key wrote in 1964, “it is in the meditative aloneness in which he paints people; but unlike Degas, Hopper’s people are not animated characters.... They are like mannequins with ﬂeshy reality ... they are alone, whether or not anyone is around them.” Perhaps because Hopper’s paintings “are so intimate, so ﬁlled with vivid atmosphere and lighting,” Key noted, “many viewers feel loneliness in his works. A sensation of this kind is there, but actually it is more a feeling of aloneness than loneliness (there is a distinct difference). It is the aloneness of an individual experiencing his own environments and situations.” Source: Donald Key, “Hopper Paintings Echo Aloneness in America.”

New York Movie 1939. Oil on canvas, 321 ⁄4 ¥ 401 ⁄8 in. (81.9 ¥ 101.9 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York — Hopper’s preparations for New York Movie —a ritual he once described as a long process of gestation in the mind and arising emotion— included 53 sketches of the interiors of movie houses, including the Strand, the Globe, the Republic and the Palace Theaters, located in the vicinity of Broadway and 47th Street. Matters of composition, light, and color were high on his agenda. He creates a splitscreen effect by running an ornate pillar and

New sidewall down the center of the canvas. At the left he shows an audience and partial view of the movie screen; at the right, an usherette standing in the hallway leading to the exit. The seating area is darkened; the hallway is bathed in light. Standing in that light, the blonde usherette becomes, in the words of art historian Avis Berman, “a shining beacon.” The viewer’s eye goes immediately to her blonde hair and blue uniform. Hopper has created a mood. We look at the usherette, leaning against the wall, and want to know more. But this is, as art curator Pamela Koob points out, a dead end: “To interpret the usherette’s solitude as loneliness may be to miss the point. Lacking expression, she deﬁes anecdote. Perhaps she is merely savoring a chance to be alone and silent after dealing with the public ... the ambiguity of the young woman seems quite deliberate and preserves the painting’s hold on the imagination.” Sources: (1) Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York (2) Pamela Koob, Edward Hopper’s New York Movie.

New York, New Haven and Hartford 1931. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm) Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana—Hopper shows the railroad tracks not very far from the summer cottage he was renting in South Truro, Cape Cod. He places a green hill and trees in deep shadow, highlighting their tops in sunlight. His sky is a muted blue with streaks of clouds. His only bright spots are the red roof and chimneys of a house situated above the dark hill and trees. When New York, New Haven and Hartford was included in Hopper’s ﬁrst retrospective exhibition, staged by the Museum of Modern Art in 1933, New York Times art critic Edward Alden Jewell called the work “hauntingly beautiful.” Jewell added, “Mr. Hopper has not been interested in the problem of exactly recording the known appearance of nature. He has been interested, and profoundly, in the appearance that has meaning for his own inward vision.” Source: Edward Alden Jewell, “Aims and Attain-

92 ments: This American Painter’s Work Admirably Presented at Museum of Modern Art.”

New York Ofﬁce 1962. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 55 in. (101.6 ¥ 139.7 cm), Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama—Here, Hopper shows an ofﬁce seemingly drenched in bright sunlight, and a woman immersed in some sort of high drama. Hopper places her apart from her coworkers; she seems anxious and a bit furtive as she holds up and examines an envelope. “We see her through a large window,” writes scholar Rolf Renner, “and the light entering it emphasizes her ﬁgure. She is like a ﬁlm star; the window is the cinema screen onto which our (the viewers’) secret wishes are projected.” It’s not by accident that Hopper’s frame for this street-level scene—a huge plate-glass window — resembles a movie screen. Edward and Jo Hopper spent countless hours taking in ﬁlms in Manhattan movie houses, many in the category of ﬁlm noir. The inﬂuence of these ﬁlms on Hopper can be seen, not only in this painting, but also in New York Movie; Ofﬁce at Night; Nighthawks; Hotel Lobby; Conference at Night. Source: Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real.

New York Pavements 1924 or 1925. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia —Hopper presents a low-angle view of a nanny pushing a baby carriage as she rushes past the entrance to a New York City apartment building. This is the same building—tall white pillars on concrete bases and two ground-ﬂoor windows — that Hopper would use nineteen years later for his painting Summertime. One of Edward Hopper’s favorite artists was Edgar Degas, and Hopper must have been delighted when his new bride, Jo, presented him in 1924 with a newly published monograph, Degas, by Paul Jamot. Coincidence or not, New York Pavements has the look of a Degas composition. Art historian Avis Berman notes how the painting “is cropped like a photograph on

93 all four sides — the lower and upper stories of the building and part of the nurse’s body have been eliminated to increase the effectiveness of the architectural mass and the diagonal lines.” Art critic Laura Cumming looks at Hopper’s urban landscapes and is a bit amused: “There are no trash cans, no signs, not even a spent butt ... the bare epiphany. Elimination, rearrangement, cropping, distancing, angle ... as an editor he [Hopper] is on a par with Degas.... As Degas wrote, ‘One reproduces only that which is necessary.’” Sources: (1) Avis Berman, Edward Hopper’s New York (2) Laura Cumming, “The Quiet American.”

New York Restaurant c. 1922. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 30 in. (61 ¥ 76.2 cm), Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan — A typical urban scene has a spare design and few human ﬁgures. New York Restaurant is different; it incorporates a half dozen or so ﬁgures in a complex composition. Curator Patricia Junker describes the painting: “Hopper offered three vignettes: at center, a man and woman dine, wholly absorbed in one another; at left, a shapely waitress with her back to the viewer clears an adjacent table; and at upper left, on the periphery, two cut-off ﬁgures who appear to be a departing male customer and the restaurant’s cashier — a pretty young woman, plainly dressed, standing at her station near the door. None of the ﬁgures acknowledges the viewer; Hopper shows us men and women who are wholly unaware that they are being watched.” Junker notes that New York Restaurant has the look and feel of a Manhattan restaurant in the 1920s, “a good uptown place, perhaps, where businessmen lunched. It is respectable but not pretentious, a place with white linen tablecloths and sprightly, young, well-groomed waitresses who wear pretty starched uniforms.” Although the room is closely cropped, the viewer can easily imagine a wider frame, Junker contends, “crowded with diners.... This lunchroom is a man’s realm, where the only women present are either servers or consorts.” Source: Patricia Junker, Edward Hopper: Women.

New

New York School of Art In 1900 Hopper enrolled at the New York School of Art (formerly the Chase School, named after its founder William Merritt Chase), where he ﬁrst studied illustration and then painting and drawing with Chase and Kenneth Hayes Miller. In 1902 Chase added Robert Henri to the teaching staff, and a number of Chase’s students quickly made their way into Henri’s classes, including Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois, C.K. Chatterton, George Bellows, Walter Tittle, Patrick Henry Bruce and Rockwell Kent. “Henri was the most inﬂuential teacher I had,” Hopper later recalled. “Men didn’t get much from Chase, there were mostly women in the class ... I was in the Life and Portraiture classes of Henri. He was a magnetic teacher.” In 1903 the New York School of Art awarded Hopper ﬁrst prize in painting, and a scholarship in life drawing; in 1904 the school invited him to teach Saturday classes in life drawing, sketching, and composition. All the while, a power struggle was developing between Chase and Henri. Bennard Perlman, Henri’s biographer, describes the two as “absolute opposites, not merely in physical appearance and dress but in their philosophies of teaching and painting as well. According to Chase, ‘Delicacy of detail is the essence of art.’ But Henri retorted: ‘Never mind bothering about the detail.... The camera reproduces the best likeness, but it is only the artist that can produce the temperament of the model.’ ... And while Chase taught technique, believing that ‘ideas will come in time,’ Henri suggested: ‘It is useless to study technique in advance of having a motive.’” The struggle between the two men ended in 1907 when Chase left the school. The headline in one New York paper read: “William M. Chase Forced Out of N.Y. Art School: Triumph for the ‘New Movement’ led by Robert Henri.’” Hopper was not at there to see Chase leave. His six years at the New York School of Art had ended in March and April of 1906 on a high note, when he took classes taught by John Sloan.

Night Sources: (1) Bennard B. Perlman, Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight (2) Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Work.

Night in the Park 1921. Etching on copper. Platemark: 7 ¥ 81 ⁄4 in. (17.8 ¥ 21 cm), Oklahoma City Museum of Art — Hopper shows a nocturnal park scene with a man seated at the end of a diagonal row of benches, legs stretched out, his back to the viewer. Under a streetlight, he reads a newspaper. British Museum curator Stephen Coppel notes that Night in the Park “may be compared to Bellow’s lithograph Solitude, 1917, in showing a nocturnal park scene. Both are similar compositionally through the use of an oblique view into space—a device learnt from the impressionists, notably Degas, and ultimately derived from Japanese art.” New York Times art critic Grace Glueck compares Night in the Park to another of Hopper’s etchings, Night Shadows: “Hopper took full advantage of the intense moodiness a black and white etching can convey, with deep lines, dark cross-hatching and Stygian shadows bitten into the whiteness of the paper ... the pervasive theme of loneliness and isolation for which he was noted is very much present.” Glueck goes on to say that the “long diagonals of the work, the overhead light and the stretch of pavement on which the park benches sit seem to foreshadow the structure of Hopper’s famous painting of 1942, ‘Nighthawks.’” Sources: (1) Stephen Coppel, American Prints: From Hopper to Pollock (2) Grace Glueck, “Art Review: Early Prints Foreshadow a Master of Loneliness.”

Night on the El Train 1918. Etching on copper. Platemark: 71 ⁄ 2 ¥ 8 in. (19.1 ¥ 20.3 cm), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois—Hopper’s angled viewpoint and attention to detail (billowing window blinds and swaying straps) bring about the sense of a train in motion. Our eye is drawn along the black of the open windows and the white of the row of seats to a romantic couple huddled in the corner of an otherwise empty

94 train car. The two seem lost in one another. Art critic David Cohen: “Hopper captures perfectly, in compressed gestures, the languor of the woman, with one foot rubbing on the calf of her other leg, her backside slipping off the edge of the seat ... and the anxious interest of the man, [straw] boater on his knee.” Prints pulled by Hopper from this etching have found their way into a number of the world’s leading art museums. Hopper’s prints went for bargain prices in the 1920s and 1930s— the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston purchased its print of Night on the El Train in 1938 for $25.50. It’s worth considerably more today. In 2005 a framed, signed and dated print of Night on the El Train sold for $204,000. Source: David Cohen, “Hopper’s Cityscapes, Prior to the Paint.”

Night Shadows 1921. Etching on copper. Platemark: 615 ⁄ 16 ¥ 81 ⁄8 in. (17.6 ¥ 20.7 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York — At the time Hopper etched Night Shadows, he was illustrating posters for silent movies. Art historian Jennifer Roberts notes that, both in his etchings and later paintings, Hopper chose “empty settings” that came to be associated with ﬁlm noir: “an isolated house, a vacant room, an abandoned street. Mystery and psychological tension are evoked through the manipulation of light ... and dramatically simpliﬁed composition.... In Night Shadows, the view of a lone ﬁgure from a high vantage point adds an atmosphere of suspense.” Hopper achieved the chiaroscuro lighting in Night Shadows by contrasting densely crosshatched lines with areas that he wiped clean. Night Shadows is the only Hopper etching not printed by the artist himself. Instead, the zinc plate was steel-faced and printed in a large run, approximately 500 copies, and the etching came to national attention when its image was included along with etchings of other American artists in the New Republic Portfolio published in December 1924. Over the years, museums large and small have been able to afford the purchase of a print of Night Shadows for their collections.

95 Source: Jennifer Roberts, “Edward Hopper,” in Deborah Wye, Artists & Prints — Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art.

Night Windows 1928. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 34 in. (73.7 ¥ 86.4 cm), Museum of Modern Art, New York— As he rode New York City’s elevated trains in the 1920s, Hopper peeked into apartments and their interiors. Night Windows emerged in part from these experiences. The scene is riveting. Three bow windows pour out their light upon the dark walls around them, yielding suggestive hints of glowing color within — the emerald of the rug, the ruby red of a divan, and the halfseen ﬁgure of a woman in rose-colored chemise. A white curtain billows out from the window at the left, signaling our attention. Night Windows is as much about architecture as it is about anatomy. In 1933 an art critic for the New York Herald Tribune gave high marks to Hopper for his treatment of the building: “He is austere, almost bald, in his notation of a facade. The ﬁgure is sparingly introduced if called upon at all. The facade, to tell the truth, is usually unlovely and Mr. Hopper does not try to make it beautiful. He contents himself with a quiet, simple, statement of the fact. Yet there is a beauty of a kind in these pictures sprung more particularly from the light in which he ﬂoods his material.” In 1980 museum curator Susan Alyson Stein contrasted Night Windows with a 1910 etching of the same name by John Sloan: “Hopper’s version ... simpliﬁes and gives focus to Sloan’s tenement scene of women at windows hanging out laundry and arranging their hair. He heightens the symbolic potential of his work by reduction to only that which is essential to him — the erotic component.... By replacing ... [Sloan’s] ‘slice of life’ perspective with a voyeuristic viewpoint ... he contrasts the intimate world of the woman to the impersonality of the city outside. The voyeuristic viewpoint, with its overtones of spying, of contemplating, of fantasizing but not directly experiencing, is integral to Hopper’s vision.” Sloan’s sprawling scene shows people opening sashes, shouting

Nighthawks down to others, undressing, hanging clothes out to dry; Hopper’s Night Windows is quiet, a simple triptych of windows. While Sloan’s tiny (5 by 7 inch) etching captures an urban working-class slice of life, it lacks the edginess, the tension of Hopper’s Night Windows. Sources: (1) “Edward Hopper: His Flair for the Pictorial Interpretation of the Spirit of Place,” New York Herald Tribune (2) Susan Alyson Stein, “Edward Hopper: The Uncrossed Threshold.”

Nighthawks 1942. Oil on canvas, 331 ⁄ 8 ¥ 60 in. (84.1 ¥ 152.4 cm), Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois —Nighthawks was inspired, Hopper once remarked, by “a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” The Art Institute of Chicago, on its website, asserts that Nighthawks, “with its carefully constructed composition and lack of narrative, has a timeless quality that transcends its particular locale.” Hopper used himself as model for both male ﬁgures in the painting; Jo Hopper posed for the hard-faced woman. Hopper gave the man a beaklike nose, prompting Jo to give this ﬁgure the nickname of “Hawk.” Thus, the painting’s title. Scholar and author Gordon Theisen describes the painting: “The diner is brightly lit from within, lending a whitish glow to the yellow walls and a shine to two large silver coffee urns on the far ledge of a mahogany counter. Three stray customers—a man and woman together and another man sitting across from them with his back to us—are being served by a younger blonde man in a white uniform and hat. This scene is at a moderate distance, as if glimpsed while passing by, on the sidewalk perhaps, through the diner’s plate-glass window.” No door to the diner is visible; there is no way to enter or leave. On display before anyone passing by, the four ﬁgures seem trapped inside the diner and perhaps up to no good. The scene stirs the imagination. We want to know what they’re doing there, and why they’re out so late at night. And yet, when critics explain Nighthawks, they can ﬁnd themselves at odds.

Nighthawks

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Theisen’s interpretation is the one most often proposed: Nighthawks as “desolate, alien, denatured, perverse, desperate,” but “nonetheless undeniably alluring.” Source: Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche.

Nighthawks in popular culture Creative artists of all stripes — painters, illustrators, sculptors, poets, writers, musicians, choreographers, television producers, ﬁlmmakers — have made use of Nighthawks. A sampling of their efforts: • In Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein shows Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Elvis Presley in a Hopperesque diner. • In Nighthawks Revisited, Red Grooms depicts the diner in daytime, with the street outside littered with trash cans, stray cats and pedestrians. In place of the “hawk” inside, he inserts Edward Hopper. • Michael Bedard in Window Shopping replaces the people in the diner with ducks and shows a crocodile outside drooling over the ducks, an image that subsequently appeared on greeting cards. • Working under the name of Udronotto, Italian artist Marco Pece creates a Lego diorama of Nighthawks • From parts of a real diner, George Segal creates a sculpture, The Diner, and adds white plaster ﬁgures. • In her poem “Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942,” Joyce Carol Oates writes interior monologues for the diner ﬁgures. • In his short story Nighthawks, Stuart Dybek wonders why his characters, “nighthawks,” should be out on the town so late at night. • Philippe Besson pens L’Arrière saison (OffSeason), a narrative in the form of a conversation between three people on an autumn day in a café on Cape Cod. Written in French, it shows Nighthawks on its cover. • Evan J. Blake, an American playwright,

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writes The Night Cafe, a 51-minute drama, set in a diner suggesting Edward Hopper’s painting, casting Hopper’s four ﬁgures as a prostitute, a disenchanted Vietnam vet, and two troubled professional actors. The singer Tom Waits produces a CD album, Nighthawks at the Diner, with songs dealing with hipsters, down-and-outers, and lost causes. Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, choreographs “Reminiscin,’” a dance performance expressing the languid loneliness of Hopper’s three diners. The television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation uses Hopper’s Nighthawks image to promote the ﬁnal two episodes of its 2006 season. Director Herbert Ross’s 1981 ﬁlm, Pennies from Heaven, starring Steve Martin, replicates the Nighthawks diner scene.

“Notes on Painting” Hopper shielded his art from critical analysis, rarely commenting on the wellsprings of his art or its meaning. Fortunately he made one exception to this rule. In the catalog for his 1933 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, he wrote “Notes on Painting,” his personal philosophy of art. Excerpts from the three-part essay: My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature. If this end is unattainable, so, it can be said, is perfection in any other ideal of painting or in any other of man’s activities. The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting... I ﬁnd, in working, always the disturbing intrusion of elements not a part of my most interested vision, and the inevitable obliteration and replacement of this vision by the work itself as it proceeds. The struggle to prevent this decay is, I think, the common lot of all painters to whom the invention of arbitrary forms has lesser interest.

97 I believe that the great painters, with their intellect as master, have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions. I ﬁnd any digression from this large aim leads me to boredom. The question of the value of nationality in art is perhaps unsolvable. In general it can be said that a nation’s art is greatest when it most reﬂects the character of its people. French art seems to prove this ... If an apprenticeship to a master has been necessary, I think we have served it. Any further relation of such a character can only mean humiliation to us. After all we are not French and never can be and any attempt to be so, is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface. In its most limited sense, modern art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period ... Just what technical discoveries can do to assist interpretive power is not clear. It is true that the impressionists perhaps gave a more faithful representation of nature through their discoveries in out-of-door painting, but that they increased their stature as artists by so doing is controversial. It might here be noted that Thomas Eakins in the nineteenth century used the methods of the seventeenth, and is one of the few painters of the last generation to be accepted by contemporary thought in this country... No one can correctly forecast the direction that painting will take in the next few years, but to me at least there seems to be a revulsion against the invention of arbitrary and stylized design. There will be, I think, an attempt to grasp again the surprise and accidents of nature, and a more intimate and sympathetic study of its moods, together with a renewed wonder and humility on the part of such as are still capable of these basic reactions. Source: Edward Hopper, “Notes on Painting.”

November, Washington Square 1932 and 1959. Oil on canvas, 341 ⁄8 ¥ 501 ⁄4 in. (86.7 ¥ 127.6 cm), Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California—In November 1932, the Hoppers carried their few belongings from their cramped fourth-ﬂoor rear apartment at 3 Washington Square North across the hall into a freshly renovated larger space at the building’s front, overlooking Washington Square Park. To mark the occasion, Hopper began a new canvas, November,

Nyack Washington Square. He chose to eliminate the square’s famous arch, although he did show part of the park’s circular fountain. His focal point was the Judson Memorial Church and its bell tower, across the park at Thompson Street and Washington Square South. In its elegance and warmth of color, the church is the one grace note in this somber, even bleak painting. Hopper ﬁnished everything on the canvas except for the sky, and then, for reasons unknown, he put the painting aside. In 1959 he added the sky, rose-tinted grey clouds intersected by a ribbon of blue. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Nude Crawling into Bed* c. 1903–05. Oil on board, 121 ⁄ 4 ¥ 91 ⁄ 8 in. (31.1 ¥ 23.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper was twentythree years old and only a few years into his studies at the New York School of Art, studying under Robert Henri, when he painted this scene. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd writes that the painting “recalls the Ashcan [School] artists’ sense of spontaneity and intimacy, dark palette and ﬂuid brushwork, closely cropped compositions, and sexualized imagery of working-class girls.” Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe.

Nyack, New York Hopper grew up at what is now 82 North Broadway in the Victorian riverfront village of Nyack. His parents were Garret Henry Hopper and Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith Hopper; his sister, older by two years, was Marion Hopper. The family home was built in 1858 by his maternal grandfather, John DeWint Smith. Nyack was then an active transportation hub, with 30 passenger trains a day passing through its rail terminal, and the NyackTarrytown ferry making regular crossings of the Hudson River. The town was a busy manufacturing center, with three shipyards, six shoe factories, four cigar factories, a church organ factory and a piano factory.

October Edward spent much of his childhood at the shipyards watching the building and rigging of sailing boats and yachts. He enjoyed sailing, and sometimes took a borrowed boat out onto the Hudson. In 1893, at age eleven, he painted The Race*, a watercolor of two boats on the river. Rowboat in Rocky Cove*, in 1895, may have been his ﬁrst oil painting. As a teenager, he expressed an interest in becoming a marine architect; sailboats and motorized ships appear in many of his later oils, etchings, and watercolors. Arthayer Sanborn, a family friend, recounts Hopper’s early artistic work: “At the age of 18 he drew such scenes as Shore at Upper Nyack; Deserted House on the Mountain, Old Saw Mill at Clarkstown, Creek at Hogencamps, Culvert at Orangetown, Old Church on New City Road, Church in Nyack, View of Hudson River from Franklin Street.” For a dozen years Hopper commuted by train and ferry to his studies at the New York School of Art and to his subsequent freelance illustration assignments, also in Manhattan. His visits to Nyack became infrequent after his 1913 move into a studio apartment at 3 Washington Square North. He found himself in Nyack more often after 1927; it was there that he garaged his automobile. Whenever he and Jo Hopper started off on a motor trip, they would spend some time visiting with his mother and his sister. After his mother died in 1935, his trips to Nyack fell off. Scenes of Nyack appear in his work: 82 North Broadway is the setting for Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack*; Stairway*; and the porch in Summer Evening. Nyack estates are pictured in The MacArthur’s Home, “Pretty Penny” and Lee Shore. Early Sunday Morning features a block of storefronts similar to those in Nyack, and Seven A.M. is modeled after a former retail bookstore north of Hopper’s boyhood home. Marion, Edward, and Josephine Hopper died in 1965, 1967, and 1968 respectively, and are buried in the Hopper family plot at Nyack’s Oak Hill Cemetery overlooking the Hudson River. Sources: (1) Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., “Edward

98 Hopper: His Rockland Heritage and Legacy” (2) Nancy Cacioppo, “What the Artist Saw: The Rockland Scenes in Edward Hopper’s Paintings.”

October on Cape Cod 1946. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 42 in. (66 ¥ 106.7 cm), Collection of Loretta and Robert K. Lifton — In late summer, Hopper returned to Cape Cod from a long motor trip. He was in his mid-sixties, and beginning to feel his years. Having painted four watercolors in Mexico and three more in Wyoming, he was drained of energy. October on Cape Cod lacks vitality: a dark forest looms behind a white house and detached garage; dead-yellow grass ﬁlls the bottom third of the canvas; no pathway leads to the house; clouds streak the sky. Jo Hopper must have sensed the conﬂuence of this somber painting and her husband’s frame of mind; her ledger book entry for October on Cape Cod ends with a line from Goethe that both anticipates death and links it to solitude. This may not be one of Hopper’s better paintings, but it is, nonetheless, Hopperesque. October on Cape Cod “may strike some as a watered-down Hopper,” writes art critic Roberta Smith. “The relatively thin paint doesn’t sing, light doesn’t come from a particular direction and the geometry of his buildings doesn’t ring quite true — the sides of the modest house and one-car garage are primitively splayed out. Yet this painting touches the deepest emotional chord, especially in the animated presence that Hopper gives this slightly abstracted form and in the gentle atmosphere that unites house with land and sky.” Source: Roberta Smith, “Review/Art: The Real World and Edward Hopper.”

O’Doherty, Brian (b. 1928) O’Doherty and his wife, American art historian Barbara Novak, were among the handful of people who were close to Edward Hopper in his ﬁnal years. The O’Dohertys visited with the Hoppers in their Washington Square North apartment, often shared a meal with them and enjoyed their friendship. Born in Ireland and trained as a physician,

99 O’Doherty immigrated to the U.S. in 1957 where he conducted medical research at Harvard. He also threw himself into the Boston art scene, catching the attention of John Canaday at the New York Times, who offered him a job. O’Doherty served as art critic for the Times (1961 –64), and later as editor of Art in America (1971 –74), and as an on-air art critic for NBC. Shortly after arriving in New York City, O’Doherty visited the Hoppers in their studio apartment at Washington Square North and persuaded them to give interviews as part of an educational television series for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston called Invitation to Art. In 1963 O’Doherty conceived of a book with the working title “Ten Modern Masters,” intending to include excerpts from the Hopper interviews. O’Doherty’s book, eventually titled American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art, was published in 1974. Hopper was given star billing, as the subject of Chapter 1. The O’Doherty interviews are valuable for two reasons: they allow us to listen to Hopper’s halting and expressionless speaking voice, and they give us an all-too-rare access to his inner thoughts. Hopper revealed to O’Doherty why he did not paint in oil out-of-doors. He preferred to return to a scene time and again, he explained, before fusing the images in the studio. Hopper said, “It’s a long process of gestation in the mind and arising emotion.” O’Doherty ended his ﬁrst chapter in American Masters with these thoughts: “Hopper was physically and mentally eligible to tap a powerful American myth, that of an obstinate individualism, of a self-reliant and no-nonsense masculinity.... He is one of the great realists of the twentieth century of which there are hardly a handful.... Hopper’s voice was nourished by silence, stealth, and a camouﬂaged sophistication.” Source: Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Ofﬁce at Night 1940. Oil on canvas, 223 ⁄ 16 ¥ 251 ⁄ 8 in. (56.4 ¥ 63.8 cm), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota—In 2006 Kathryn Shattuck, writ-

Ofﬁce ing in the New York Times, offered this description: “In ‘Ofﬁce at Night’ a man in his 30’s or 40’s sits at a heavy desk in a sparsely furnished room, a voluptuous secretary standing with her hand in a ﬁle drawer nearby. Twisted in a provocative if physically strained position — both breasts and buttocks are visible — she could be looking at him. Or maybe she’s wondering how her skin-tight dress will allow her to stoop down to pick up the paper dropped on the ﬂoor, and if she does, what the outcome will be. A breeze enters an open window and rustles a blind as the man reads a document, apparently oblivious to the situation. Or is he?” The painting’s male/female dynamic is intensiﬁed by what art historian Robert Hobbs describes as a “slightly skewed” perspective, a “change in scale between the secretary’s table, the man’s desk, and the woman standing in front of the ﬁle cabinet.” This “lack of balance and proportion within the painting,” Hobbs argues, “sets up tensions that are then communicated to the viewer.” Hopper was embarrassed by the response of art critics to Ofﬁce at Night. He wrote that his intent in Ofﬁce at Night was not to tell a story but to give the sense of an isolated and lonely ofﬁce high in the air, and that his primary concern had been working out the painting’s various sources of light. Sources: (1) Kathryn Shattuck, “Entering an Expectant Realm in Hopper’s ‘Ofﬁce at Night’” (2) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper.

Ofﬁce in a Small City 1953. Oil on canvas, 28 ¥ 40 in. (71.1 ¥ 101.6 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City — Hopper often views his subjects from an unusual perspective; the one he uses here is extreme. We see a man in shirtsleeves and vest sitting at a desk, seemingly trapped, staring through a large rectangle that serves as a window. We know he is high above the street, for only the rooftops of the buildings opposite can be seen. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl notes that the ofﬁce is like “an abstracted control tower, seen from an impossible point of view in the air outside.”

Oils Hopper may have identiﬁed with the man he paints in this scene. The desk in Ofﬁce in a Small City is overly large and looks more like a drafting table, the kind illustrators use. Like this ofﬁce worker, Hopper too had been isolated and lonely, out of his element, during the eighteen years he worked in illustration. Hopper started Ofﬁce in a Small City while summering in South Truro, Cape Cod, and ﬁnished it in his Washington Square North studio. A short time later, the painting was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and included in the opening of the museum’s new American art galleries in 1953. Source: Peter Schjeldahl, “Ordinary People.”

oils Hopper was thirteen years old when he painted his ﬁrst known oil on canvas, Rowboat in Rocky Cove*, a landscape. By age 18 he had completed ﬁve oils and over 20 watercolors. During his years at the New York School of Art, 1900 to 1906, he painted almost exclusively in oil, completing over 100 works on canvas or board. During his ﬁrst two visits to Paris, France (1906–07 and 1909), he again worked in oil, and often en plein air along the banks of the Seine. He thought of himself as a ﬁne artist, that is, an oil painter. In his thirties he worked out four dozen oils at summer art colonies in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and at Ogunquit and Monhegan, Maine. Starting in 1908, and for a dozen years, he placed his Paris and New England oils in exhibition after exhibition, selling only one, Sailing, for $250 in 1913. In 1915 he took up etching, and within a few years was selling prints and gaining attention as a graphic artist. The years in etching helped him to deﬁne a painting style, a style that came forward in the oil paintings Girl at a Sewing Machine and New York Interior in 1921 and New York Restaurant in 1922. The pivotal year for Hopper was 1923. In Gloucester for the summer, he hooked up with the artist Josephine Verstille Nivison, who persuaded him to put aside oil painting in favor of watercolor. Quickly successful in this medium, and fueled by critical acclaim

100 (and sales), Hopper went on a watercolor spree: by the end of 1938 he had painted close to 272 watercolors, an average of 17 a year. In those same ﬁfteen years, he completed 63 oils, only 4 a year on the average. He reversed gears again in the late 1930s; between 1938 and the end of his painting career he completed 59 oils but only 24 watercolors. Hopper’s watercolors often please the senses and sometimes stir an emotion, but lacking ﬁgures and a narrative potential (like a stage without actors), they do not strike deeper chords, and are almost never thought of as “iconic.” That accolade is generally reserved for Hopper’s oils, such as (but not limited to) New York Interior; Sunday; Automat; Chop Suey; Tables for Ladies; Room in New York; New York Movie; Ofﬁce at Night; Gas; Girlie Show; Nighthawks; Summertime; Conference at Night; Morning Sun; Western Motel; Excursion into Philosophy; A Woman in the Sun. Critics have come to understand that Hopper hid his skills as an oil painter, so that his virtuosity would not get in the way of the picture’s effect. Novelist and art critic William Boyd wrote: “Hopper was such a good painter that he deliberately decided to make his paintings look as if he were a bad painter.... What you immediately notice when you look at a Hopper oil close up (say six inches) is how laboriously the paint is applied and worked. There is nothing free-ﬂowing, no agile brushstroking. There is a doggedness and ﬂatness about the painted surface, a patient air of covering the canvas diligently. The effect ... is to make the paintings look almost amateurish in technique ... the trees in Gas are an amorphous lumpy mass with a lot of black mixed with the near uniform green.... The technique looks clumsy, heavy-handed and homespun.... The same qualities apply to his ﬁgures.... The raddled stripper in Girlie Show, the buxom secretary on Ofﬁce at Night ... they are more mannequins than people.” It is Hopper’s “studious, careful artlessness,” Boyd concludes, that makes him “the great American painter of the twentieth century.”

101 Source: William Boyd, “The Best and the Worst: Notes Towards a Deﬁnition of Edward Hopper.”

El Palacio 1946. Watercolor on paper, 203 ⁄ 4 ¥ 285 ⁄8 in. (52.7 ¥ 72.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Painted from his hotel rooftop during his second trip to Saltillo, Mexico, El Palacio shows a commercial street with an assortment of buildings, a water tower, a movie theater (“El Palacio”) and, in the background, treeless mountains. What makes this painting odd when compared to his three other watercolors that summer is the inclusion of commercial signs on the street below. Instead of leaving out these honky-tonk elements, Hopper features them, leading art critic Rolf Renner to relate this painting to Hopper’s early work as an illustrator. Hopper had detested illustration, and Renner suspects an irony in “the contrast between the name ‘Palacio’ and the ﬂat roofs, dreary facades and ... water tower.” After this trip, Hopper painted only six more watercolors over the remainder of his career. He preferred to work in oils, and in his studio. In a 1960 interview with Katharine Kuh, Hopper explained that he had abandoned watercolor, not because he preferred to work slowly, but because “watercolors are done from nature and I don’t work from nature anymore. I ﬁnd I get more of myself working in the studio.” Sources: (1) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real (2) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists.

Palms at Saltillo 1943. Watercolor on paper, 20 ¥ 25 in. (50.8 ¥ 63.5 cm), Private Collection —Palms at Saltillo was painted during Edward and Jo Hopper’s ﬁrst trip to Mexico. They traveled by train, ﬁrst to Mexico City and, two weeks later, to Saltillo. Arriving in Saltillo, they took a room in a modest commercial hotel. The Hoppers were relieved to ﬁnd Saltillo to be different from Mexico City: cooler, quieter, and less expensive.

Parc Since Hopper had no car, he set up shop on the roof of his hotel (some of that rooftop shows up in Palms at Saltillo). Hopper was content in his roost, isolated from the Mexicans below. He had no interest in exploring an exotic culture; he had come to Mexico as an artist, not as a tourist. In 1944, an art critic for The Christian Science Monitor wrote that “ ‘Palms of Saltillo’ ... proves that, no matter where Hopper goes, the same subject matter appeals to him. It may be that his eye is so trained that these are literally the only subjects he sees. Here is ... his special province — the wide and simple horizontal composition, the rooftops, the far reaches of the trees, the expanse of sky, and the low eye-level horizon. One ﬁnds Hopper using these subjects in his paintings as far back as 1926, nearly 20 years ago, in the rooftops of New York and especially Washington Square.... But it is a rather interesting commentary ... that, of all the excitement of new and brilliant color, of strange people, dramatic mountains, and intense light, the beauty for Hopper lay not in the strangeness of new subjects, but in new aspects of old familiar ones— the fascination of the tried and proven composition.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places (2) “‘Palms of Saltillo’: A Water Color by Edward Hopper,” The Christian Science Monitor.

Le Parc de Saint-Cloud 1907. Oil on canvas, 231 ⁄2 ¥ 281 ⁄2 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — In the spring of 1907, during his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, Hopper traveled south on the Seine to the park at Saint-Cloud. After a rainy fall and winter, he was glad to be painting out-of-doors. For this painting, he adopted an impressionist palette of light yellows and greens, and the palest of baby blue for the sky. Art critic Charles W. Millard commends Hopper’s design elements: “Le Parc de Saint-Cloud ... is held in place by the horizontal accents of three trees that disappear beyond the top edge of the canvas, their shadowed trunks not only providing considerable value contrast to the

Paris sun-drenched lawn and sky but almost Mondrian–like vertical counterpoint to the otherwise unrelieved horizontality of the scene.” Hopper’s spare composition, a set of steps ascending from one level to the next, the three trees, and a mere glimpse of a building and balustrade, predicts the abstract leanings of his mature work. In fact, art critic Theodore F. Wolff asserts that Le Parc de Saint-Cloud “ is so assured in its handling and so superbly ‘abstracted’ in its design, that it could easily be mistaken for one of the better landscapes of the 1950s and ’60s, possibly one painted by Fairﬁeld Porter or Richard Diebenkorn.” Sources: (1) Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper” (2) Theodore F. Wolff, “The Human Side of Edward Hopper”

102 lections; he was unimpressed by Cézanne, but very attentive to the works of Manet and Degas. Inﬂuenced by the Paris light and the impressionists, he painted large canvasses, using a light and bright palette. Hopper would make two more trips to Paris, in 1909 and in 1910, painting views of classic architecture, sculptural monuments and life along the Seine. It was here that he ﬁrst experimented with light and shadow effects. Art critic Hilton Kramer writes that “among these ‘French’ paintings there are more than a few that alert us to the themes — especially the theme of light — that later emerged as the staples of Hopper’s art.” Sources: (1) Holland Cotter, “Hopper’s Views of the City of Light” (2) Hilton Kramer, “Art: The Whitney Recognizes Hopper’s Special Place.”

Paris, France Hopper made his ﬁrst of three visits to Paris in 1906. His teacher at the New York School of Art, Robert Henri, had encouraged all students to make such a trip. Through their Nyack, New York, church, his parents arranged lodgings at the Baptist mission in Paris, located on the Seine’s left bank. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter notes that he arrived in Paris “in a glum, rainy autumn. Perhaps the weather was responsible for the look of his initial paintings there: small, claustrophobic interiors done in the mahogany browns and dark grays reminiscent of Henri’s palette, and moody studies of architectural details like a dark ﬂight of stairs leading up from a riverside quai to an oddly blank, milky sky. Here one already has a sense both of the realist tradition Hopper came from and the surrealistic ﬂavor of his later work. With the paintings dated 1907, spring is suddenly in the air, along with French impressionism. ‘Gateway and Fence, St. Cloud’ is a rigorously geometric composition of the kind Hopper always favored —all deadcenter verticals and horizontals.” Patrick Henry Bruce, a student of Robert Henri living in Paris, introduced Hopper to the work of the impressionists. Through introductions by Bruce, Hopper gained access to a number of private art galleries and col-

Paris Street* 1906. Oil on wood, 13 ¥ 93 ⁄ 8 in. (33 ¥ 23.8 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York —Paris Street shows an intersection surrounded by four- and ﬁve-story buildings. Although Hopper’s blue-grey palette reﬂects his interest in French impressionism, he also adds his own touches: a dark red at the bottom of one building and strong sunlight on the plaster of the upper ﬂoors. He uses elements of composition he would maintain throughout his career: large geometric forms, ﬂat masses of color, and architectural forms featuring strong verticals, horizontals and diagonals. In 2003, Paris Street was one of the 45 works included in a traveling exhibition, “Edward Hopper: The Paris Years,” organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition opened at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, before going on to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno and the Tyler Museum of Art in Texas. The Mint Museum notes the impact on Hopper of his visits to Paris: “In three stays in Paris beginning in 1906, Hopper explored the Left-Bank and painted views of the classic architecture, sculptural monuments and vistas of the city along the Seine River. His experimentation with light and shadow, dramatically shaping

103 and deﬁning bridges, buildings, rooftops and stairways, would impact his mature style.” Source: “Whitney Curator Hankins on Hopper,” News of the Mint Museums.

Le Pavillon de Flore 1909. Oil on canvas, 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 285 ⁄ 8 in., (59.7 ¥ 72.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This was Hopper’s third painting of a pavilion that extends out from the Louvre. His Pavillon de Flore in the Spring (1907) had been thoroughly impressionistic: the brushwork choppy, the colors muted, the bridge barely visible, and the building at the pavilion’s end little more than a muddy blur. Le Pont Royal (early 1909) was more deﬁned, but still muted and largely impressionistic; perhaps this was because it was painted under a winter sun, and perhaps there was still a chill in the air. Le Pavillon de Flore was painted in the late spring. The sunlight reﬂects on the exterior walls and on the stately mansard roof. The pavilion, writes art critic Charles W. Millard, “is immediately juxtaposed with a shadowed foreground structure (a boat anchored in the Seine) to collapse space and give continuous, coherent, and contrasting structure to the composition.” The painting is a decided break from impressionism: Hopper uses a dark palette, makes dramatic use of light and shadow, and places the architecture against an intense sky. Art critic Hilton Kramer argues that while Le Pavillon de Flore “may not have attained the formal power that Hopper would achieve with his American subjects,” it “nevertheless represents the same impulse.” Sources: (1) Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper” (2) Hilton Kramer, “Art: The Whitney Recognizes Hopper’s Special Place.”

Pemaquid Light 1929. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine — During his ﬁnal summer of painting in Maine, Hopper returned to one of his familiar subjects—lighthouses. The Pemaquid lighthouse, located near the town of

Pennsylvania Bristol, was built in 1835. It stands at only 34 feet, but because it sits atop a huge promontory of granite rock, its beacon, 79 feet above sea level, is visible for 14 nautical miles. Traditionally, the lighthouse has been painted or photographed from below, but Hopper, art historian Janet Comey notes, “chose a vantage point from which the dramatic rocks are hidden. He cropped the lighthouse and included a jumble of buildings on the right, which he balanced with a group of ﬁgures on the left.... Hopper used the reserved paper to indicate the dazzling sunshine on the white conical tower and added pale blue to convey the shadow patterns produced by the rough stone. He enlivened the blocky shapes of the auxiliary buildings by adding intense indigos and touches of red along the roof lines.” Hopper almost never included ﬁgures in his landscapes. Here he shows the lighthouse keeper, Leroy S. Ewell (appointed in 1922), and three of his friends. In 1934 the lighthouse became the ﬁrst in Maine to be automated; the keeper’s house was closed and shuttered, and Ewell lost his job. Source: Janet Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Pennsylvania Coal Town 1947. Oil on canvas, 28 ¥ 40 in. (71.1 ¥ 101.6 cm), The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio—“No hints of class conﬂict intrude on Hopper’s vision of American society,” observes art critic Robert Hughes. “There are no noble peasants, striving workers, moneybags plutocrats, or town meetings to be seen — no sense of collectivity.... The only painting in his oeuvre that could even be guessed to show an industrial worker is Pennsylvania Coal Town and its ﬁgure of a bald man ... raking grass outside his house in the sunlight.” Hughes is on safe ground. The Hoppers detested Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms geared to the needs of the working class. Hopper never painted in Pennsylvania; he passed through the state returning from visits to the American West in 1941 and 1946. Pennsylvania

People Coal Town was conceived and executed in Hopper’s New York City studio. The house and property in this working-class neighborhood appear to be neat and well maintained, and the man’s attentiveness to his lawn is obvious. This could be any small town in America. Hopper is interested, not in the struggles of its residents, but in the impact of light wherever it falls. Source: Robert Hughes, American Visions.

People in the Sun 1960. Oil on canvas, 403 ⁄8 ¥ 603 ⁄ 8 in. (102.6 ¥ 153.4 cm), National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.— Artist and author Gerry Souter provides this description: “The painting depicts ﬁve fully-dressed people sitting in camp chairs on concrete gratefully absorbing the rays of a low sun. Part of a concrete building with familiar gold-coloured curtains anchors the upper left corner. A distant mountain range lies beyond a prairie plain of golden grass. The work is strangely dreamlike, as if the people are waiting for an event to occur. The mountains are saw-toothed, peaks evenly spaced and the colour of waves at sea ... certain details in the clothes, the folding chairs, the pleated curtains combine to suggest a frightening reality.” In describing People in the Sun, Souter never uses the word “surrealism.” German art historian Ivo Kranzfelder asserts, “Hopper, like the surrealists, had a special eye for the trite, ordinary, supposedly insigniﬁcant things ... Hopper’s ‘recreationists’ ... appear to be trapped in the absurdity of their own activity or lack of it ... his People in the Sun, for instance, sit in rows of deck chairs on the patio of a building in the midst of a wide plain, with a mountain range in the background. A corner of the building, the ﬁgures, a landscape — that is all we see.”

104 photography. Joel Meyerowitz values Hopper’s way of seeing: “I learned that there was a power to be found in the most ordinary things if you knew how to look at them. The way to look at them, Hopper was showing me, was hard: ‘Look to the point of fascination,’ he seemed to say, ‘don’t turn away. Trust that if you stand long enough to lose yourself you’ll see something. And if you learned how to wait, things ... would slowly seep into your mind and acquire a gravity, a signiﬁcance that could be measured with paint and feeling.” Photographer Thomas Pindelski admires Hopper’s sense of composition, writing that “Hopper is that most photographic of painters. And I don’t mean photographic in the dry, sterile, rather sick sense of the photorealists.... No, I mean it in the sense that with his people-inthe-city paintings there are all the elements of photographic composition with the painter’s singular advantage that distracting clutter can simply be blended out with some brushwork.” And for Frank Van Riper, photography columnist for the Washington Post, it is Hopper’s ability to produce on canvas a quality that photographers rarely capture, “a telling moment or gesture that speaks to a more universal condition among us all.” In 2009 San Francisco art dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel organized an exhibition entitled “Edward Hopper & Company,” an ambitious show exploring Hopper’s connection to contemporary photographers. Hopper’s art — seven paintings and three sketches—was shown along with images by eight photographers: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore.

Sources: (1) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (2) Ivo Kranzfelder, Edward Hopper 1882 –1967: Vision of Reality.

Sources: (1) “Artists’ Panel: Joel Meyerowitz, George Segal, William Bailey, with Gail Levin, Moderator,” Art Journal (2) Thomas Pindelski, “Edward Hopper and Photography” (3) Frank Van Riper, “Edward Hopper and the ‘Decisive Moment’: An American Realist Painter Captures Life in a Photographic Style.”

photography

Les Poilus

Many photographers feel a kinship to Hopper, while also recognizing that painting is not

1915–17. Etching on copper. Platemark: 6 ¥ 7 in. (15.2 ¥ 17.8 cm), Whitney Museum of

105 American Art, New York —Les Poilus was one etching of four that Hopper titled in French. The work may have been triggered by the fanfare surrounding “the latest Parisian Operatic Success,” Le Poilu, which debuted in 1916 at the Garrick Theater, not far from Hopper’s Washington Square apartment. Carl Zigrosser’s summary of Les Poilus — “Three French soldiers talking to a woman in sabots. Thatched cottage to left”— does not capture the tension inherent in the scene. Les Poilus, French slang for “hairy ones,” was a label hung on rough-and-tumble French soldiers in World War I. Hopper shows three army men confronting a woman in the street. The woman, hand on her hip, appears to be holding her own. In 1917, Hopper submitted Les Poilus to the First Annual Exhibition of the Painter-Gravers of America, at Frederick Keppel & Co. The critics were not impressed. Later that year, Hopper had another opportunity to exhibit, this time at the Art Institute of Chicago. In an attempt to broaden the etching’s appeal, he gave it a title in English, Somewhere in France. Source: Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper.”

Le Pont des Arts 1907. Oil on canvas, 237 ⁄16 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (59.5 ¥ 71.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Late in his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, Hopper turned to new design elements. His earlier Paris paintings had been straight-on views of bridges, parks and street scenes. In Le Pont des Arts he uses a diagonal wedge form for the path alongside the river, a diagonal that repeats in the river and a blur of buildings on the opposite bank. These diagonals are set against the horizontal sweep of the bridge, giving the scene an added depth. Art historian Richard Brettell is impressed: “Very few great American painters of the twentieth century were able to see as much important French art in so short a time as Hopper, and virtually everything Hopper himself said about art in later years evolved from French aesthetics of the impressionist and post-

Poor impressionist periods ... virtually every aspect of Hopper’s later oeuvre ﬁnds its roots in Paris.” Source: Richard R. Brettell, Hopper in Paris

Le Pont Royal 1909. Oil on canvas, 231 ⁄ 4 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.1 ¥ 72.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York —Le Pont Royal marks the beginning of Hopper’s move away from impressionism. He experiments with light and shadow to deﬁne both the bridge and mansard-roofed building. The 1907 palette of pastels is now darker in tone. What remains of impressionism is the loose brushwork used to depict the large building and its reﬂection on the Seine. The buildings of Paris, France, and especially the south facade of the Louvre, made a deep impression on Hopper. He painted Le Pont Royal, one critic noted, “with solid simplicity, the absorption with light and feeling for architecture that constitute the basis of his present-day style.” Source: “The Early Roots of Edward Hopper’s Art,” Art Digest.

Poor, Henry Varnum (1888–1970)— Poor was an accomplished painter, sculptor, muralist, potter and selftaught architect. He designed his own home, Crow House, in New City (not far from Hopper’s boyhood home in Nyack, New York) and also designed houses or home renovations for the couple Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and for John Houseman, Burgess Meredith and Maxwell Anderson. Early in 1934, Hopper, in need of design ideas for the summer home and studio he was about to build, visited Poor in New City. When work on the structure was complete, Poor drove to South Truro, Cape Cod, to inspect the results. Poor and his wife struck up a friendship with the Hoppers, one that deepened when Poor purchased a Truro property, Dauphinée House, that had been the subject of a Hopper painting. When Poor joined the coterie of artists at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in 1940, Hopper made a point of attending Poor’s ﬁrst exhibi-

Portland tion there. In 1953, as members of a ﬁve-artist editorial board of a new publication, Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions, Poor and Hopper led a protest against the way the art world was embracing abstract art. Curator Judith Barter notes that the editorial board could not agree on what they stood for, but were certain of what they stood against. In the ﬁrst issue of the journal, Poor wrote of “the forces in our art world that threw things out of balance. Museums and critics were so quick to surrender all the values that we felt were permanent, and thus were making of our profession a thing of cults and fads, and obscurity and snobbery.” Source: Judith Barter, “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures.”

Portland Head Light or Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine 1927. Watercolor on paper, 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 inches (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts — Commissioned by George Washington and dedicated by the Marquis de Lafayette in 1791, Portland Head Light is Maine’s oldest lighthouse, and one of its most beloved. The white tower rises 101 feet above sea level and functions, even today, as a beacon for ships rounding Cape Elizabeth’s rocky coast as they leave or enter Portland Harbor. Hopper painted three watercolors at this site in the summer of 1927. Portland Head Light is the most celebrated of the three. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg praises Hopper’s composition, a “graceful conical structure surrounded by various outbuildings, a fence, and a keeper’s house” set against “the quiet blue of the calm sea. The roofs, chimneys, and lighthouse make a clean line against the horizon.” Curator Janet Comey feels that “Hopper made the scenic view even more attractive by restricting the palette to light blue for the sky, darker blue for the ocean and shadows, gold for the grass, and reddish brown for the roofs of the surrounding structures. He also deleted

106 anything extraneous such as fences and paths, which would have detracted from the vista.” Hopper also painted two watercolors at the same spot that year, one a close-up view of the base of the lighthouse (Rocky Pedestal) and the other of the lighthouse keeper’s home (Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head). Sources: (1) Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (2) Janet L. Comey, “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.”

Portrait of Orleans 1950. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 40 in. (66 ¥ 101.6 cm), de Young Museum, San Francisco, California—This is one of Hopper’s eerier scenes, and more than a bit surreal. In this depiction of an intersection not far from his summer home in South Truro, Cape Cod, he takes a number of compositional liberties. The business center is all but deserted; the streets curve unrealistically; the bright multi-colored storefronts seem implausible; the towering trees form an ominous backdrop. The one truly authentic element is the Esso sign in the upper right of the canvas. In one of Hopper’s seven preparatory sketches the street looks more ordinary — the stores are not so homogeneous, and he uses a utility pole to bisect the composition. Hopper’s sketches were important to him in establishing a scene’s authenticity and yet his completed paintings often took a different direction. Hopper was dissatisﬁed with the progress of Portrait of Orleans and especially irked at the absence of an evening sky that met his needs. In the end there was no sketch of an evening sky — Hopper faked one of his own. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Portuguese Church 1923. Watercolor on paper, 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34 ¥ 50 cm), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York — From 1850 on, Portuguese immigrants had been ﬂowing into Gloucester, Massachusetts, joining the ﬁshing industry. “They settled on a hill just east of downtown,” explains Glouces-

107 ter historian Mark Kurlansky, “a hill that reminded them of the Azores in the way it sloped down to the waterfront. The neat, closely placed, two-and three-story houses reﬂect the light from the harbor and glow in the later afternoon, which made the hill a favorite painting site for the artist Edward Hopper. It was and still is called Portuguese Hill.” Looking past one of these two-story houses and a wooden fence that creates a horizontal across the scene, Hopper shows the tops of the two towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage, the neighborhood’s Portuguese church. The original church had burned down in a ﬁre in 1914. When it was rebuilt the following year, it included two great blue domes modeled after those on a famous Azorean church. Hopper chose not to show the church in all its ﬂourishes; he was more interested in matters of composition and color. The fence top and the house to the left (with the American ﬂag ﬂying in front, most likely a schoolhouse) form a rectangular frame for the church towers and sky. He inserts a vertical (his favorite, a telephone pole) and uses its shadow to lead the viewer’s eye to the top of a playground slide peeking over the fence. The palette is soft, reﬂecting the afternoon summer sun: light yellow and mustard color for the fence, house and lower portions of the church towers, and gray-blue accents in a light sky. Source: Mark Kurlansky, The Last Fish Tale.

Prospect Street, Gloucester 1928. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Collection of Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel —Prospect Street, Gloucester is the one Hopper painting to show an automobile in a city, suburban or rural residential area. Perhaps this was because he had only recently purchased his ﬁrst car. In 1912, 1923, 1924 and 1926 he had arrived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, by train; in 1928 he and Jo motored into town in a used Dodge. In 1934 Hopper replicated Prospect Street, Gloucester on a larger scale, and in oil, calling it Sun on Prospect Street. At the bottom of both the

Quai original painting and the replication, we see a touring car with a canvas top. It’s safe to say that this automobile was not the one driven to Gloucester by the economy-minded Hoppers. To obtain this view, Hopper positioned himself near the bottom of Prospect Street, where it feeds into Main Street (his back was to the subjects that attracted most artists in Gloucester, the inner harbor and the ﬂeets of ﬁshing boats). Looking up Prospect Street, he was able to capture the rows of houses and, two blocks further, atop Portuguese Hill, the towers of Our Lady of Good Voyage, the church serving the town’s Portuguese-American ﬁshing community. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg notes that the way Hopper handled various architectural styles demonstrated “his mastery of the use of light and shadow.... Highlighted gables, dormers, and a mansard roof speak to the mingling of period styles.... By including automobiles as well as the church towers and a tree, Hopper introduced a complex mix of new and old and, with the sweep of the paved street, stressed the infusion of the modern world into the older domestic way of life.” In 2007, Prospect Street, Gloucester was auctioned off at Christie’s New York for $2,057,000. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Le Quai des Grands Augustins 1909. Oil on canvas, 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.4cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper had painted this Paris, France, scene once before. His 1907 oil Le Quai des Grands Augustins with Trees had shown the same sweep of the Seine and its bank and high retaining wall, with boats moored at the quay, everything bathed in soft light and painted in muted blues accented by light yellows and whites. Although the 1907 composition converges on a bridge at center left, nothing in the scene, not even the bridge, catches the eye. (The stretch of buildings above the river is the ill-deﬁned architecture common to French impressionism.) Hopper returned to Paris in 1909 and re-

Queensborough visited the very same spot, but closer to the wall, buildings and bridge. Le Quai des Grands Augustins is far more dramatic, especially at the top half of the canvas, where Hopper uses sun and shadow to spotlight the bridge and to bring out the details of the mansard-roofed buildings. Le Quai des Grands Augustins was one of ten Paris paintings included in Hopper’s ﬁrst oneman show at the Whitney Studio Club in 1920. The reviews were mixed; most critics preferred his scenes painted at Monhegan Island, Maine. (At that time American themes were preferred, and French subjects were out of favor.) A half century later, when Le Quai des Grands Augustins was exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, critic Hilton Kramer wrote of seeing, for the ﬁrst time, the pictures Hopper had painted in Paris: “The Hopper we know so well — the Hopper that emerged in the late 1920s with a style all his own—is a painter so dry and austere, so ‘American’ in texture and feeling, that this ‘French’ Hopper comes as something of a shock. We hardly expect painting so lush and brushy from ‘our’ Hopper—painting so ﬁlled with the emotions of youth and so much in love with its Parisian subjects.” Source: Hilton Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972–1984.

Queensborough Bridge 1913. Oil on canvas, 251 ⁄2 ¥ 371 ⁄ 2 in. (64.8 ¥ 95.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Here Hopper shows a largescale steel structure towering over a small wooden house that sits below on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island). In doing so he comments on technology and tradition. Four years earlier, working in Paris, France, he had painted Le Pont Royal. That bridge, notes art historian Robert Hobbs, “does not upset the balance between buildings intended for habitation and bridges used for the transportation of people and goods. In Queensborough Bridge, however, the balance is upset, and the clapboard house looks pathetic in relation to the bridge ... human values have obviously been upset and made incidental.”

108 “Queensborough Bridge unmistakably deﬁnes a transition from the European to the American” in Hopper’s art, writes art scholar Rolf Günter Renner. “In the years that followed the Armory Show,” Renner observes, Hopper “began to emphasize both his identity as an American artist and the psychological dimension of his art. Sources: (1) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper (2) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real.

The Railroad 1922. Etching on copper. Platemark: 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art — Hopper divides his composition by placing a slightly tilted pole cropped at the top edge of the image. It is echoed on the right by a line of telephone poles that follow the track as it bends into the distance. At the left, roofs and chimneys rise above a knoll separating them from the tracks, accenting the horizon. No train is shown; instead we see a rail worker stepping out of deep shadows to cross the tracks. By 1922 Hopper had perfected his command of intaglio technique. In The Railroad he contrasts and balances areas of light and dark: he leaves the upper half of the plate unetched and unlinked, and renders the ground in a tangled network of inked lines. To create the dense, almost solid black tones in the left area of the image he uses scribbled crosshatching. When The Railroad was shown in 1922 at a Brooklyn Society of Etchers exhibition in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times praised the etching’s “structural strength ... Edward Hopper builds with his lines and patches of dark an impregnable fortress of design. The curve of a railway ... expresses all the cold vigor of modern industry in the language of abstract beauty.” Source: “The World of Art: Brooklyn Society of Etchers,” The New York Times.

Railroad Crossing 1922-23. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 393 ⁄4 in. (73.7 ¥ 101 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art,

109 New York—Hopper created three distinct artworks on this subject: an oil, an etching and a watercolor. In this oil, nature seems to do battle with a house, railway track, diamondshaped crossing signal, and telephone poles. Scholar Rolf Günter Renner points out that Hopper heightens the tension “by using an unusual perspective and by making the track and signs demark the boundary separating domesticated Nature (near the house) from its dark and untamed equivalent, the brooding pathless woods beyond.” Hopper’s 1923 drypoint etching Railroad Crossing strikes a similar theme. It shows a farmer and his cow standing at a railway crossing, a large telephone pole and railroad signal nearby. Graphic art curator Carl Zigrosser judges Railroad Crossing to be one of the ﬁnest of Hopper’s dozen or so drypoints, “so accomplished that one regrets that the artist did not work more often in the medium ... superbly drawn and rich in the color and texture of the dry-point burr.” The 1926 watercolor, titled Railroad Crossing, Rockland, Maine, features a wide road leading over railway tracks toward a house. The road blazes white in the sun, dominating the scene. Our view is from below the road, and we lose sight of it as it disappears over the tracks. Hopper’s odd perspective adds an emotional jolt to what would otherwise be a rather ordinary rural landscape. Sources: (1) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real (2) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper.”

Railroad Sunset 1929. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 473 ⁄ 4 in. (71.8 ¥ 121.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper’s attentiveness to composition and color is readily evident in this large-scale oil of a New England sunset. After seeing Railroad Sunset at the Whitney Museum’s Hopper retrospective in 1971, art critic Peter Frank called it “incredibly breathtaking for its uncompromising horizontality — broken by the equally uncompromising verticality of the sentry house — and even

railroads more so for the rainbow of colors: blue to green to yellow streaked with purple to red to the blue-green of distant mountains.” Hopper never sold Railroad Sunset; Arthayer Sanborn, who befriended the Hoppers in the 1950s and 1960s, told an interviewer that the painting “may have been one of their more favorites and he kept it.” Railroad Sunset was one of the many works of art bequeathed to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968 by Hopper’s widow, Josephine. Sources: (1) Peter Frank, “Art: Hopper at the Whitney” (2) Interview between Arthayer Sanborn and Elizabeth Thompson Colleary.

Railroad Train 1908. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts — The sense of a train speeding by is heightened by the blurred brushwork everywhere, and by the way Hopper tilts the horizon line and the train. Eve Tushnet, art critic for Commonweal, observes that Hopper’s thick brushstrokes make the rear cars of the train “look like a furry old animal.” Hopper had yet to ﬁnd his own style. There are clues everywhere in Railroad Train to suggest that he was recently returned from Paris, France. “Hopper emulates the impressionists’ light touch,” writes curator Elliot Bostwick Davis, “in rendering the grass and sky ... the brilliant red of the rear lights reﬂects on the ﬂowers along the bank, an American twist on the abstracted touches of red paint Monet scattered in his ﬁeld of poppies. A band of grey smoke unfurls across the sky, distinct from the clouds in the far distance.” Sources: (1) Eve Tushnet, “Naked but Not Exposed: Edward Hopper at the National Gallery” (2) Elliot Bostwick Davis, “Hopper’s Foundation.”

railroads Hopper’s painting career spanned the years when railroads came to dominate American transportation. The train station in Nyack, New York, was only a short walk from his family home. Beginning at age 17, and over

Realism the next decade, he commuted by rail and ferry to New York City. He fell into the habit of sketching views from the train window. Bits and pieces from these sketches, and from his memory, turn up in his art. If houses are his prime subject; rail travel is next. In etching: Night on the El Train; American Landscape; Train and Bathers; The Conductor (1920–23), House Tops; The Railroad; Railroad Crossing (1923); The Locomotive. In watercolor: D. & R. G. Locomotive; Locomotive and Freight Car* (1925), Railroad Trestle in the Desert* (1925), Lime Rock Railroad (1926), Railroad Crossing, Rockland, Maine (1926), Circus Wagon (1928), Railroad Gates (1928), Truro Station Coal Box (1930), North Truro Station (1930), Captain Kelly’s House; Freight Car at Truro; Railroad Warning (1931), Railroad Embankment (1932), Back of Freight Station (1932), The Forked Road (1934), Toward Boston (1936), Crossing at Eastham (1938), Cottages at North Truro (1938). In oils: The El Station; Railroad Train; Small Town Station* (1918–20), Railroad Crossing; House by the Railroad; Freight Cars, Gloucester; Railroad Sunset; New York, New Haven and Hartford; Dauphinée House; Dawn in Pennsylvania; Approaching a City; Hotel by a Railroad; Chair Car. Poet Mark Strand observes that the “remarkable number of roads, highways, and railroad tracks in his paintings speak for Hopper’s fascination with passage. Often, while looking at his work, we are made to feel like transients, momentary visitors to a scene that will endure without us and that suffers our presence with aggressive reticence.” Source: Mark Strand, “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World.”

realism Hopper’s style of realism can be linked to Robert Henri, his teacher at the New York School of Art and a member of the Ashcan School, who urged his students to render realistic depictions of everyday life. For Henri there was only “one reason for the development of art in America, and that is that the people

110 of America learn the means of expressing themselves in their own time and in their own land. In this country we have no need of art as a culture; no need of art as a reﬁned and elegant performance; no need of art for poetry’s sake, or any of these things for their own sake. What we do need is art that expresses the spirit of the people of today.” Although impressionists such as Manet and Degas inﬂuenced Hopper’s early art, by the 1930s critics were placing him alongside Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins as a prominent American realist. “By realism in painting,” writes art critic Aline Louchheim, “we mean two things: the subject matter is concrete, actual, credible, drawn from the world around us; and the artist is willing to let emotion or expression of an idea come as a byproduct of more or less faithful representation.” When Hopper stated that his true aim in painting was to get “the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature,” he was saying much the same thing. When the quarterly magazine Art in America awarded Hopper its 1960 annual award ($1,000 and a medal designed by the sculptor Seymour Lipton), Stuart Preston of the New York Times called Hopper “the dean of American realist painting, an artist whose work through many years has succeeded in getting under the skin of American life in a unique way. Mr. Hopper ... combines a straightforward style with an austere, detachedly poetic point of view, which is remindful of the poetry of Robert Frost.” Sources: (1) Aline B. Louchheim, “Realism and Hopper” (2) Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (3) Stuart Preston, “Art: Award to Hopper; Quarterly Honors Dean of U.S. Realist Painting.”

Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions Edward Hopper was a member of the editorial board of Reality, a publication put out by forty-six artists in 1953 (only three issues were published). The journal advocated for realist art at a time when nonobjective painting was quickly taking over. Henry Varnum

111 Poor wrote in Reality’s debut issue of the journal’s beginnings: “The ﬁrst meeting of this group was in response to a postcard from Raphael Soyer in March 1950. We met in a restaurant. I recall Kuniyoshi, Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Leon Kroll, Joseph Hirsch, Philip Evergood and Raphael Soyer.” Reality urged the Museum of Modern Art to give realism the same consideration it was then extending to the art of Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell and others in the school of abstract expressionism. In a 1981 panel discussion of six people who knew Hopper, Raphael Soyer remembered the “furious reaction ... on the part of the Museum of Modern Art, of art critics, and of art publications.... Some artists, afraid to lose standing with the Museum of Modern Art, resigned from the group. But Edward Hopper stayed on the editorial board and, although he seldom took part in the discussions, he never missed a meeting.” Then Soyer quoted this statement by Hopper from Reality’s ﬁrst issue: “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term ‘life’ as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature’s phenomena — before it can again become great.” Source: “Six Who Knew Edward Hopper,” Art Journal.

Reclining Nude* c. 1925–30. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 19 ⁄ 8 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Whitney Museum 7

Rehn of American Art, New York—Newly married, Jo Hopper insisted on being the model for every female ﬁgure in Hopper’s paintings. Over the next four decades she posed for her husband in a variety of settings, often nude. Hopper was demanding: he made numerous preparatory sketches, and fussed over the elements of his composition. The process did not lend itself to tenderness. Reclining Nude is not in this mold. Hopper is painting his new bride, not a model. He shows her totally relaxing among several plush pillows, one leg thrown back over the couch. In the words of museum curator Susan Larsen, the watercolor is “fresh and unhesitant ... intimate, rather seductive ... here we are allowed a glimpse of the great stoic as tender lover. He pauses lovingly over the details of his new wife’s anatomy — the curls of undone hair falling lightly on the delicate nape of her neck, a blush of color rounding out the curves of her buttocks—but also devotes equal attention to the lush environment of rumpled bedclothes. The different earth tones of the pillows, punctuated by the creamy torso and limbs, create a patchwork of soft fabric and sensual ﬂesh.” Source: Susan C. Larsen, “Edward Hopper: Painter of Modern Life.”

Rehn, Frank K.M. (1886–1956) In 1923 Frank Knox Morton Rehn established an art gallery at 6 West 50th Street in New York City. This became the only gallery utilized by Hopper throughout his career. Hopper found Rehn almost by accident. Hopper’s friend Guy Pène du Bois suggested in 1924 that Hopper bring some paintings to the C.W. Krauschaar Art Galleries. Krauschaar told Hopper that his work was too stark. Passing the Rehn Gallery on his way home, Hopper decided to give it another try. Since Rehn was about to go to lunch, he told Hopper to spread out his work, promising to view it later in the day. At that moment, a customer entered, stopped in front of Hopper’s rendition of a Victorian house, and began to bubble over in enthusiasm. Rehn sold the picture on the spot, and became Hopper’s representative.

Road Rehn arranged an October 1924 exhibition of Hopper’s watercolors. Sixteen works were sold at $100 each. John Taylor Spaulding, a lawyer and trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, bought four paintings; Elizabeth Cameron Blanchard, a New York decorator, bought three paintings. Spaulding and Blanchard would become two of Hopper’s early patrons. George Bellows, a fellow artist, bought Haskell’s House and House in Italian Quarter. For every sale, Rehn took a one-third commission; for example when he sold Two Puritans in 1947 for $2,250, he sent a check for $1,500 to Hopper. The professional relationship entered into by Hopper and Rehn in 1924 deepened into a close friendship. It was out of character for Hopper to reach out to someone in need, but during the 1930s depression, when Hopper knew things at the gallery were not going so well, he tried to loan Rehn some money. It is not known whether Rehn accepted the offer. In 1953 a stroke prevented Rehn from directing the gallery, which had been relocated in 1930 to 683 Fifth Avenue. Rehn died in March of 1956. It seems odd that the New York Times obituary made no mention of Hopper: “Mr. Rehn’s interest was American painters. He handled the works of such noted artists as the late George Bellows, George Luks and Reginald Marsh.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (2) “Frank K. Rehn, Jr., Art Patron Here” New York Times.

Road and Trees 1962. Oil on canvas, 34 ¥ 60 in. (86.4 ¥ 152.4 cm), Collection of Mr. And Mrs. Daniel W. Dietrich II — Hopper was eighty years old when he painted this large canvas at his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio; he would paint only ﬁve more pictures before his death in 1967. Here he shows, from bottom to top, a stretch of grass, a narrow strip of road, a line of trees, and a blue sky. The sun shines on a few trees, but most are in dark shadow. Rehn Gallery owner John Clancy paid

112 Hopper $10,000 for the painting in 1963. He sold it to art collector and philanthropist Daniel W. Dietrich II in the year Hopper died. In 2002 Dietrich loaned the painting to Hamilton College and was invited to share his thoughts at the exhibition. He remembered his impressions at the time he acquired the painting: “Road and Trees looked oddly curdled and dissonant and slightly sour and somewhat empty. Missing were the Hopper regulars ... the totemic stunned people; the white clapboard facade cut on the bias by that Hopper sunlight; the hard-won balance wherein a highway or a mass of trees might just play a supporting role in the drama. Usually the Hopper road served to take us in, by diagonal, to the upstage action. Typically Hopper trees gave distance and space to some scene, which might otherwise atrophy ... one could say Hopper poses some question, and it is still hovering, unanswered, in this very moment, in his Road and Trees.” Source: “The Art of Collecting,” Hamilton Alumni Review.

Road in Maine 1914. Oil on canvas, 241 ⁄ 2 ¥ 291 ⁄ 4 in. (61.6 ¥ 74.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Over the years an art colony had developed in Ogunquit, Maine, and Hopper decided to spend the summer there in 1914. In all, he painted seven oils. Road in Maine shows the stretch of Shore Road that passes in front of the present Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Flanked by three telephone poles, the road is shown curving around a massive rock outcropping. Blues, greens and yellows are used to soften an austere scene. The painting is an early example of Hopper’s experimentation with sunlight and shadow. There is no evidence of human presence or activity, but instead a mood of silence that would later come to be associated with Hopper. Road in Maine was ﬁrst exhibited in the autumn of 1914 at New York’s Montross Gallery (Hopper’s ﬁrst opportunity to show in a commercial gallery). “Many of the exhibitors,” a

113 New York Times art critic noted, “are young men and all have youth of spirit.” He praised ‘Vivid Landscape in the Woods,’ by E. Ambrose Webster, and the “richness of color and sense of pattern” in Jonas Lie’s ‘The Hilltop,’ and Rolston Keeler’s ‘The Old Porch,’ with its “quality like that of ancient jewelry, a patina that enhances the beauty of the color.” He was less enthusiastic about Hopper: “Edward Hopper is decorative in an obvious way, with his ‘Road in Maine,’ which contains some excellent rock drawing.” Source: “Art Notes: First Exhibition of the Season at the Montross Galleries,” The New York Times.

Rocks at the Fort 1924. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.5 ¥ 50.8 cm), Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania—Hopper depicts a scene in Gloucester, Massachusetts,’ working-class Sicilian neighborhood known as the Fort. The backs of four houses form a modest skyline as they follow the slope of a rocky hill down to the harbor. In the yard behind the house at the extreme left wash hangs on the line, a scene that recalls John Sloan’s painting A Woman’s Work (1912). A man and his dog stand atop the rocks, silhouetted against a grayish-white sky. Even though he is small in scale, “his placement makes him a focal point in the composition,” curator Virginia Mecklenburg asserts. “His gaze links him visually with the laundry blowing in the breeze at the lower left, strengthening human presence in the scene.” This watercolor is soft, ﬂuid and transparent. “Hopper indicated the landscape with thin veils of color, Mecklenburg explains, “while using denser, somewhat darker strokes to outline the rugged boulders. In this watercolor Hopper was honing his compositional skills. The steep diagonal of the hillside, the silhouetting of houses against a pale sky, and the cropping of the house at the paper’s left edge are artistic devices that he would use repeatedly in his later work.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Roofs

Rocky Pedestal 1927. Watercolor over charcoal on paper, 14 ¥ 197 ⁄8 in. (36 ¥ 50 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — In 1927 the Hoppers spent the summer at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, occasionally traveling a bit north to Portland. Hopper preferred to paint not the sea but man-made structures at its edge. Here, looking up from the beach, he shows a lighthouse station perched atop a rocky pedestal of jagged rocks. Everything is sun-splashed: dark brown roofs match up against a light blue sky above and the streaked yellow stone formation at the bottom half of the canvas. The Carnegie Museum website notes that this was a period of time when “Hopper generally painted watercolors on the spot, often ﬁnishing them in a single sitting. He began each one with a simple but careful charcoal drawing and ﬁnished with the brush, keeping the medium transparent and avoiding the use of gouache. Much of the beauty [of Rocky Pedestal] lies in the varied colors of the shadows, which range from solid black for the center window and foghorn to the more delicate shades of blue or other shadows. This variety of color contributes in a subtle way to the mood of the piece. While the solid blacks seem to block the viewer’s eye, the softer blues invite exploration of the shaded areas.” Curator Virginia Mecklenburg points to Rocky Pedestal as an example of Hopper’s tendency to use “objects from various periods of time.... The Daboll trumpet, a foghorn that had been in use in the mid-nineteenth century, replaced, and again pressed into service in the late 1880s, is outlined against the eighteenth-century lighthouse tower ... Hopper used these warning devices as elements within a landscape whose sunlit beauty belies the hazards of winter storms.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors

Roofs of the Cobb Barn 1931. Watercolor on paper, 191 ⁄ 2 ¥ 271 ⁄ 4 in. (49.5 ¥ 69.2 cm), Collection of Charles and

Roofs Marjorie Benton — Here, Hopper decides to feature the clean geometric forms and white planes of the barn roof. This is the only one of Hopper’s many paintings of his landlord’s barn complex to show the buildings “headon,” notes art curator Ellen Roberts, “making them harder to read spatially but more interesting as a two-dimensional, abstract composition of planes and angles.” Roberts theorizes that like “Paul Cézanne in his postimpressionist views of houses—although he would never have admitted that inﬂuence — Hopper transformed the structures into simpliﬁed blocks in order to investigate the formal relationship between them.” Hopper chose this version of roofs of the Cobb barn to send to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in the fall of 1931. Roberts feels that “with its greater abstraction, it was a more sophisticated exploration of the modernist potential of the Cape’s architecture.” Source: Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro.”

Roofs, Washington Square 1926. Watercolor over charcoal on paper, 137 ⁄8 ¥ 197 ⁄8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — The Carnegie Museum website offers this description: “Here, Hopper could not have chosen a more inauspicious subject — a view of the smokestacks on the roof of 3 Washington Square North, the building where his New York studio was located. The vertical rhythm of the chimneys and the bright mid-day sun gave the artist an opportunity to paint both light and color. His color choices are unusual— deep blue, pink, and rust-red — hardly the colors of an industrial gray New York rooftop!” The Carnegie blurb is on the mark. This watercolor is an example of Hopper’s talent for turning everyday objects — roofs, chimneys, windows—into a composition of harmonious forms, with his dramatic use of sunlight and shadow sharpening the effect. In Edward Hopper: Forty Masterworks, art historian Heinz Liesbrock observes that the sunlight in Roofs, Washington Square “captures

114 the viewer’s eye and invests the objects with their visual power.” Liesbrock senses that Hopper’s “art of seeing ... transcends appearances and ... can reveal their true signiﬁcance.” Hopper spent many hours concentrating, contemplating, and working out the arrangements of Roofs, Washington Square and other artworks. More importantly, his thoughts evolved along with his preliminary sketches. “To me,” he once wrote, “form, color and design are merely a means to an end, the tools I work with; and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake.” Source: Heinz Liesbrock, Edward Hopper: Forty Masterworks.

Room in Brooklyn 1932. Oil on canvas, 291 ⁄ 8 ¥ 34 in. (74 ¥ 86.4 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts—This somber apartment scene features a seated woman, her back to the viewer, gazing out an upper-ﬂoor window. Her head is bowed, almost as if she were in mourning. The room is bare except for her chair, an adjacent table covered in dark cloth, and a small stand holding a spray of ﬂowers in a white vase. Except for the draped table, everything is lit by sun streaming through windows. This is the only painting in which Hopper included ﬂowers. “I don’t care very much for ﬂowers,” he once told his friend Brian O’Doherty, and he disdained the ﬂowers Jo Hopper used in her still lifes, tagging them as subjects for “lady painters.” The “so-called beauty is all there,” he once asserted, “you can’t add anything to them of your own — yourself.” Source: Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Room in New York 1932. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 36 in. (73.7 ¥ 91.4 cm), Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska—Hopper’s viewpoint is through a large window into an apartment, where we see a man in shirt and tie sitting in an armchair, reading a newspaper, and a woman, dressed for the evening, sitting on a stool at a piano, one ﬁnger on the keys. She

115 seems forlorn, and her body language taps out a message: Pay attention to me! The man gives no response. Anyone peeking into Hopper’s Washington Square North apartment in the 1930s might have witnessed a similar scene. Josephine Hopper was always ready and eager to converse with her husband, but Hopper was obsessively quiet and regularly tuned her out. His preference for quiet and contemplation can be seen in his paintings. His friend and fellow painter Charles Burchﬁeld noted that the “element of silence ... seems to pervade every one of his [Hopper’s] major works ... it can be almost deadly, as in Room in New York.” Source: Charles Burchﬁeld, “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry.”

Rooms by the Sea 1951. Oil on canvas, 291 ⁄ 4 ¥ 40 in. (74.3 ¥ 101.6 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut—Hopper painted Rooms by the Sea in his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio, not far from a steep cliff fronting Cape Cod Bay. He shows the studio as a huge, empty space ﬂooded in sunlight, its door thrown open to the sea. At the left, he offers us a glimpse into a tidy and well-appointed second room. The impact is jarring, as surreal as anything painted by Magritte. Katharine Kuh, a friend of the Hoppers, remembers Hopper’s summer studio: “Because the house was located as near the edge of the bluff as possible, one saw only water, as if from the deck of a lofty steamer. The intense sunlight still haunts me, pouring in from all directions and also bouncing back from the sea with exaggerated intensity.... Rooms by the Sea of 1951 tells the whole story, for here, light, asserting its dominance and deﬁning its own space, diminishes everything around it.” Source: Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art.

Rooms for Tourists 1945. Oil on canvas, 301 ⁄4 ¥ 421 ⁄ 8 in. (76.8 ¥ 107 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut — Parked nearby, and

Root working for several nights under the light of his car dome, Hopper made a number of preliminary sketches of this Provincetown boardinghouse. Hopper never informed the owner of the establishment of his project; it seems almost surprising that the Provincetown police were not called in to investigate. Curator Ellen Roberts ﬁnds Rooms for Tourists interesting in the way that Hopper explores particular light effects: “He created a dramatic contrast between the Provincetown building’s interior, brilliantly lit by electricity, and the darkness of night outside, just as he had done in a series of urban scenes beginning with Night Windows in 1928. The glow from an electric street light spills into the right foreground of Rooms for Tourists, further complicating the arrangement of light and shadow.” Hopper’s paintings are more than the sum of their parts. This house welcomes tourists, but it also projects something more sinister. Scholar Rolf Günter Renner suggests this scene is an ambivalent world in which “the things that comfort us and the things we ﬁnd unsettling are implicitly shown to have the same origins.... Although the lights are all on, there is nobody seen anywhere inside the house. The very light has a mysterious quality.” And art critic Carl Little writes that the “shadowy ediﬁce depicted in Rooms for Tourists ... suggests a certain evil atmosphere.” Hopper’s boardinghouse reminds Little of the house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt where Joseph Cotton, after killing a widow, takes refuge. Sources: (1) Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro” (2) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real (3) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England.

Root, Edward Wales (1884–1956) Root, one of Hopper’s early patrons, also became his friend. Root was socially prominent, the son of Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. At the age of twentyeight Root studied with George Luks who, as one of The Eight, challenged the dominance of conservative academic art.

Route Root built a collection of 227 paintings and works on paper (most of which he bequeathed to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York). He became aware of Hopper’s art in 1928, when the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery organized an exhibition of Hopper’s work in Utica. Root held the work in high regard, and over the next several years he purchased a number of Hopper paintings, including Freight Cars, Gloucester; Skyline Near Washington Square; and The Camel’s Hump. He also collected work by Charles Burchﬁeld, and the friendship between Burchﬁeld and Hopper came about only after Root persuaded Burchﬁeld to switch to the Rehn Gallery in 1929. Sources: (1) Mary E. Murray, American TwentiethCentury Watercolors at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute (2) Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Route 6, Eastham 1941. Oil on canvas, 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 381 ⁄4 in. (69.9 ¥ 97.2 cm), Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana — As the title suggests, Hopper focuses on the road rather than on the houses and barns. Hopper’s choice of vantage point (on the downgrade of Route 6) puts him below his subjects. The houses, barns and long stretch of road seem to move toward and beyond the horizon line. He visited the scene time and again, making sketches. In October he began the painting in his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio. Jo Hopper doubted that it would come to anything; to her it looked like a lot of pavement and not much more. She was disappointed in the white houses with their black roofs — she felt the painting needed color. The strength of the work’s composition became apparent to Jo, and she was won over. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

Ryder’s House 1933. Oil on canvas, 361 ⁄ 8 ¥ 50 in. (91.6 ¥ 127 cm), National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.—Ryder’s House was

116 included in Hopper’s 1933 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It shows a Cape Cod structure built in 1839 and little else, only a grassy terrain merging into undeﬁned hills. Despite the summer sunlight, the scene seems chilly and uninviting. The subject, painted directly from nature, was within walking distance of the Hoppers’ rented cottage in South Truro, Cape Cod. “Hopper streamlined the structure,” explains Ellen Roberts, assistant curator of American art at the Art Institute of Chicago, “depicting an unusual view of the kitchen ell and shed that causes this large house to appear smaller and simpler than it actually was. He also left the clapboards out entirely, making the building even more Cézanne-like, as if it were a set of geometric blocks. Further, Hopper painted the house from the back, so there is no door.... In doing so, he de-emphasized its human function.” Jo Hopper remembered the comment of an artist at the gallery where Ryder’s House was being shown: “I can hear the silence.” Of course, most South Truro houses at that time were not stark and foreboding. Curator Carol Troyen makes a point of this in a 2006 article in American Art: “In a guidebook to the Cape, Hopper’s neighbor Katy [Mrs. John] Dos Passos described old houses like this one as busy and convivial (‘full of warmth, enticing smells of baking and cooking, activity, children, pets, and the gossip of neighbors who always stopped in at the side door’).” Troyen comments that “Hopper replaced comfort with steadfastness, community with austerity.” Sources: (1) Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro” (2) Carol Troyen, “Edward Hopper and Ryder’s House.”

Saies, Enid Marion (1885–1962) Enid Saies may well have been Hopper’s ﬁrst love interest. Gail Levin, dean of Hopper scholars, tells the story of how the two met in 1906 during his ﬁrst trip to Paris, when they both boarded at the Eglise Evangélique

117 Baptiste located at 48 rue de Lille. Enid was English, but was ﬂuent in French and other languages, and a lover of books. At 5' 8" she was, like Hopper, tall. Edward and Enid kept company, going on excursions to Versailles and attending the opera. When her studies ended, Enid left to join her family, then living in London, and began preparations to marry a Frenchman. On an impulse, Edward followed her there, squired her about town and ﬁnally confessed his love, proposing marriage. Enid turned him down. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Sailboat* c. 1900, watercolor on paper, 53 ⁄ 8 ¥ 41 ⁄2 in. (13.7 ¥ 11.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—Hopper often saw scenes like this — a gaff-rigged schooner running downwind—from the Hudson River shoreline at Nyack, New York, where he lived. Nyack was a shipbuilding town; in his youth Hopper often bicycled the ﬁve minutes from his home to the foot of Van Houten Street, where he would observe the construction and launching of schooners, paddle-wheel steamers and pleasure craft. (The boatyard is still there, doing business as Julius Petersen’s Boatyard.) At the time Hopper painted this nautical scene he was barely out of high school. Nonetheless, his composition and color choices and his use of light and shadow are impressive, and especially so considering the tiny size of the work. Source: Arthayer R. Sanborn, “Edward Hopper: His Rockland Heritage and Legacy.”

Sailing 1911. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — Hopper painted Sailing upon his return from his ﬁnal trip to Paris, France; the painting shows the inﬂuence of French impressionism in its heavy layers of paint and in the blurred ﬁgures of the crew. Much of the painting is taken up by the sloop’s gib and

Saint mainsail rig, which Hopper tilts in the direction of the viewer. In 1913 Hopper placed Sailing in the “International Exhibition of Modern Art,” better known today as the Armory Show. The painting competed with the works of Duchamp, Cézanne, Courbet, Degas, Matisse and Picasso, among others. Sailing was purchased for $250. It was Hopper’s ﬁrst sale of a painting (a decade would pass before he sold another). In 1980 an X-ray at the Whitney Museum of American Art revealed, beneath Sailing an early Hopper self-portrait. The Associated Press reported: “Gail Levin ... associate curator of the museum’s Hopper collection, said yesterday she was able to make out Hopper’s chin line, mouth and part of an ear through the thick paint.” It may turn out that Hopper’s use of impasto was a matter of cost and not of style— a thick application of paint allows an artist to place new images over old ones. Source: “X-Rays Find Self-Portrait ‘Neath ‘Sailing’ Art,” The Observer-Dispatch (Utica, New York).

Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe* 1925. Watercolor on paper, 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper presents a decorative interpretation of Saint Michael’s College, rendered in mostly black and white with green foliage and yellow door under a hearty blue sky. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg describes Saint Michael’s College, as it was in 1925, as “an elegant building that seems anachronistic in a town that had yet to install street lights or pave its roads.” It belonged to the Christian Brothers, a Roman Catholic sect devoted to education. The building Hopper painted was then a half-century old, and housed both a dormitory and classes. “The white structure,” notes Mecklenburg, “its remarkable mansard roof patterned with diamond-shaped tiles, gleams in the bright New Mexico sun. Hopper took care to detail the balusters of the second-ﬂoor railing, the quoins of the central pavilion, and the slats of the open shingles. The beams supporting the

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Saint railed balcony are clearly delineated, and the verticals of a delicate iron fence are lightly touched in.” Interestingly the college painted by Hopper is now considered a leader in creative arts, and this in a city, Santa Fe, New Mexico, that has 300 art galleries and, after New York City, the largest art market in the United States. This makes it even more ironic that, even though Saint Michael’s College was readily marketable, Hopper never submitted it to his dealer, the Frank KM. Rehn Gallery. Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

St. Francis Towers, Santa Fe 1

1

1925. Watercolor on paper, 13 ⁄ 2 ¥ 19 ⁄2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.— This was Hopper’s ﬁrst trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Without a car, and conﬁned to town, he found it difﬁcult to locate suitable subjects. St. Francis Cathedral, located in downtown Santa Fe, was an obvious choice. Hopper’s painting does not show the cathedral as it is today; its two impressive spires, rising from atop the bell towers, were added subsequent to 1925. Hopper achieves a dramatic perspective. In a series of sharp angles and contrasts of verticals and horizontals, he makes the viewer peer over adobe walls at the rooftop and bell towers. By simplifying the building forms and eliminating all nonessential details, and by a skillful rendering of light and shadow, he transforms a picturesque scene into a remarkable composition, showing the adobe walls in muted tan, the building trim in medium cobalt blue, and church towers in earthy brown hues. His loose brushwork provides added texture to the adobe walls. Source: Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places.

Saltillo Mansion 1943. Watercolor on paper, 211 ⁄ 4 ¥ 271 ⁄ 8 in. (54 ¥ 68.9 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — This is the third of four watercolors created by Hopper during his 1943

stay in Saltillo, Mexico. Reﬂecting the elegance of the sophisticated Spanish Baroque style, Saltillo Mansion is larger in scale than Hopper’s watercolors in the 1920s and 1930s. Here, he sets the bright white of the mansion, with its elaborate cornice and decorative trim, against a deep blue sky and distant hills. Curator Virginia Mecklenburg explains that Saltillo Mansion was “painted on lightly textured paper that enabled Hopper to introduce light by varying the density of pigment rather than by adjusting hue.” “In doing so,” Mecklenburg adds, “Hopper was also able to capture the textured adobe surfaces of the geometrically conceived buildings.” Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Saltillo Rooftops 1943. Watercolor and gouache on paper, 211 ⁄ 2 ¥ 295 ⁄ 8 in. (54.6 ¥ 75.2 cm), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — This painting came about after Hopper bumped into Katharine Kuh during his ﬁrst trip to Mexico. Kuh remembers that Hopper “asked me to recommend an area where he would feel more at home, a town as he put it, with ‘no renowned monuments, no quaint or picturesque tourist attractions.’ I suggested the town of Saltillo about 650 miles north of Mexico City ... Saltillo had impressed me as somewhat down at the heels and honky-tonk, yet it turned out to be a lifesaver for Hopper ... it offered him a refuge from the distractions that appeal to most visitors in Mexico.” Several months later Kuh was shown the ﬁnished paintings. Her reaction: “The watercolors done from the hotel roof tell us less about Saltillo than about Hopper. What he chose to record were truncated chimneys and water tanks, the domes of humble churches, the tops of prosaic low buildings interrupted by a few discolored walls, all seen in bright sunlight with arid, treeless mountains as a backdrop. It could have been any small unlovely town, but Hopper made it his own, chieﬂy by the slant of his vision. His perspectives, building across the paper horizontally, were slightly

119 tilted and cut by occasional diagonals, almost as if caught by an amateur’s camera. But unlike a camera, the artist omitted more than he included, eliminating all fussy detail.” The Carnegie Museum’s website comments on the importance of this painting: “Hopper’s early watercolors were small and fresh in technique, and he generally completed them in a single sitting. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, in such works as Saltillo Rooftops, he moved to a larger scale and a more calculated sense of composition. He also worked on his watercolors for longer periods, sometimes as much as a month, carefully building up the colors ‘in a series of glazes,’ although always with translucent washes and never with opaque pigment. This resulted, as is evident in Saltillo Rooftops, in an extraordinary depth and richness of color, particularly in the shadows, and a new solidity in the realization of form.” Source: Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art.

Sanborn, Arthayer Russell, Jr. (1914–2007) Arthayer Sanborn came to know the Hoppers through his contact with Marion Hopper at the First Baptist Church in Nyack, New York, where he had been installed as minister in 1953. Marion regularly attended the church, founded by Hopper’s maternal grandfather a century earlier. “I ﬁrst met Edward Hopper,” Sanborn recalled, “at the family home ... when he and wife, Jo Hopper, came to spend a few days with his sister, Marion. He was a giant of a man — a very quiet giant. He had little to say.... For some reason, a quiet bond was forged between us, and we remained friends for the rest of his life.” Sanborn knew the Hoppers well enough to visit them in their Washington Square North studio in New York City without making an appointment. Journalist Louisa Kreisberg noted that “For many years the Rev. Sanborn looked after Edward’s sister ... and when the Hoppers’ health began to fail, he helped them too because ‘more and more they needed me.’” Sanborn ofﬁciated at Hopper’s funeral in 1967.

Santa After Jo’s death the following year, he learned that he had been named as one of six heirs to the Hopper estate. The Reverend Sanborn relocated to Melbourne, Florida, in 1972. In retirement he began to delve more deeply into the art and life of Edward Hopper. In a 2006 interview with scholar Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, he recalled that he would come “to NY and stay at the 92nd Street Y. They permitted me to work at the Whitney.” He and his wife, Ruth, also visited places where Hopper had been: Paris, California, Massachusetts, Mexico, Wyoming, Cape Cod, Vermont, New Hampshire, South Carolina. In his interview with Colleary, Sanborn spoke of Hopper’s childhood friend, Ralph Bedell: “Edward, as a boy, had very few friends. He had one in particular that I kept in touch with even after Edward had died, because he had been a lifelong friend of Edward’s ... and he gave me a manila envelope one day while I was there and said, ‘You ought to have these.’ They were drawings that Edward did when the two of them would spend time up in the attic, after school.” These early drawings, along with his purchase of the entire contents of the Hopper house — at a time when it was still slated for demolition — comprise the bulk of Sanborn’s collection of Hopper art. In 1980 selected works from the collection were exhibited in “Edward Hopper: The Early Years” at the Brevard Art Center and Museum in Melbourne, Florida. Sanborn’s statement in the catalog: “I am proud and grateful to have been a part of the life of this great American artist and his wife, Jo.” Sources: (1) The Boyhood World of Edward Hopper (2) Louisa Kreisberg, “I Remember Edward Hopper” (3) Interview between Arthayer R. Sanborn, Jr., and Elizabeth Thompson Colleary (4) Patricia C. Ritter, Edward Hopper: The Early Years.

Santa Fe, New Mexico Wanting a change from summers in New England, and at the urging of friend and fellow artist John Sloan, Edward and Jo Hopper

Sea in 1925 traveled by train to Santa Fe. Along with nearby Taos, Santa Fe had become a popular destination for New York City artists; Sloan purchased a house in Santa Fe in 1920 and both Robert Henri and George Bellows summered there. “Hopper set foot on Santa Fe soil and disliked everything about it almost immediately,” notes artist and author Gerry Souter, and “despite his desire to explore new visuals, his disconnection from the familiar scenes of Gloucester [Massachusetts] and the north east seashore was uncomfortable.” In Gloucester, Hopper had preferred to paint in working-class neighborhoods rather than at the picturesque harbor. In Santa Fe, he steered clear of the hordes of tourists and the locals selling Indian pots and jewelry and, instead, went off on his own to ﬁnd subjects to paint. Most of his watercolors were of commonplace subjects in Santa Fe: Adobe Houses; Adobes and Shed, New Mexico*; D. & R.G. Locomotive; Locomotive and Freight Car*; Pink House with Stone Wall*; Poplars; Railroad Trestle in the Desert*; House near a Dry Stream*; Ranch House, Santa Fe. Two of Hopper’s paintings, however, were of Santa Fe landmarks. St. Francis Towers, Sante Fe, shows two church towers rising above the roofs of an adobe courtyard. Souter thinks this watercolor might well have been called “Portuguese Church II,” because of its similarity to Hopper’s 1923 watercolor of a Portuguese church in Gloucester: “Both paintings put the religious buildings at a distance behind fences and walls.” Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe, is the most elegant of the Santa Fe paintings, showing the building’s mansard roof, diamond-shaped tiles, secondﬂoor railings with balusters, and a delicate iron fence. Hopper’s only depiction of the locals in New Mexico was in La Penitente, an eerie scene in which Hopper superimposes a small black silhouette of a woman walking along a windswept hillside. The painting’s title alludes to the Penitente Order, a shadowy sect of ultra– Catholics known for extreme acts of physical piety, including self-ﬂagellation. Hopper

120 scholar Gail Levin links Hopper’s interest in this secret religious group to his 1910 visit to Madrid and Toledo, where he ﬁrst saw El Greco’s paintings of Spanish mystics. After 1925, Hopper never again showed an interest in Santa Fe, although the Hoppers stopped there brieﬂy in 1951 on their way to Mexico. Sources: (1) Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places (2) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark.

Sea Watchers 1952. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), Private Collection — Hopper had passed his 70th birthday when he painted this scene in his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio. He and Jo Hopper had spent more than twenty summers on Cape Cod. Sea Watchers shows a man and woman sitting next to each other outside a beach house. Something about the painting leads an occasional critic to suspect an underlying tension. “In the hands of another artist,” writes The Guardian art critic Maev Kennedy, “this could be a jolly scene of a couple staring out to sea.... In Hopper’s hands it feels as if one will have to murder the other, just to break the silence.” Artist and writer Gerry Souter notes: “A middle-aged couple in bathing suits stare out to sea from the deck of their modest beach house. Laundry ﬂaps on its clothesline. They face the sea as though some great crippling event had stricken them mute.” Sources: (1) Maev Kennedy, “Only the Lonely” (2) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark.

Second Story Sunlight 1960. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 50 in. (101.6 ¥ 127 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—On a huge canvas, Hopper shows a young woman dressed in shorts and halter sitting on a second story railing, sunbathing. Nearby, an older woman in a dark dress sits stifﬂy in her chair, reading a book. Only a few feet apart, the two seem unconnected. The house, sky and dark woods dominate the scene, dwarﬁng the ﬁgures.

121 Impressed by Second Story Sunlight, James Thomas Flexner mailed off this interpretation to Hopper: “I felt both in the formal and emotional tensions of your painting a pull between restraint and the opulence of nature. Restraint represented by the peaked architecture and the old lady for whom all passion is spent; opulence, by the line of trees, the sky, and the marvelously buxom young lady sitting on the edge of the porch, not waiting for anything in particular, yet fertile and sure in the movement of the seasons to be fulﬁlled. I felt it was an allegory of winter and spring, life and death.” Flexner may have taken his analysis too far. “I don’t think there was really any idea of symbolism in the two ﬁgures,” Hopper told Katharine Kuh in 1960. “I was more interested in the sunlight on buildings.” Sources: (1) James Thomas Flexner, Random Harvest (2) Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists.

Self-Portrait* c. 1910. Watercolor on paper, 183 ⁄ 8 ¥ 121 ⁄ 4 in. (46.7 ¥ 31.1 cm), Private Collection—This is one of six known self-portrait paintings by Hopper, and the only one in watercolor. He shows himself seated, wearing a gray suit jacket, dark blue pants, white shirt and tie, and facing a straight-backed chair that holds a canvas. One arm rests on his thigh, the hand clenched; his eyes, guarded, look off to the left, his mouth is tight-lipped. At this time, Hopper was in his late twenties, making no headway as a ﬁne artist, and working in a ﬁeld, illustration, that he detested. All this may or may not have contributed to the fact that the painting lacks ﬁnishing touches and is unsigned. Earlier, Hopper had completed four selfportraits (probably student exercises); one in 1903 and three others dated 1903–06. All are rendered in the dark palette Robert Henri urged on his students at the New York School of Art. Artist and writer Gerry Souter observes that Hopper looks out from these four early oils “from deep blue eyes, shaded by uncompromising brows, down a well-shaped but not

Self over-large nose. The mouth, however, begins to tell the story. It is a petulant mouth stretched wide with a thin upper lip pressed against a demanding, insistent slab of a lower lip.” Souter asserts that Hopper “saw himself without ﬂattery and stamped the canvas with an implacable image. His restless and relentless nature drove him in many directions.” The portrait that most people know is the 1925 oil (the subject of the next entry). Source: Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark.

Self-Portrait* 1925–30. Oil on canvas, 251 ⁄ 8 ¥ 201 ⁄ 4 in. (63.8 ¥ 51.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This is the most famous of Hopper’s self-portraits, painted when he was in his mid-forties. Art curator Jeffrey Cudlin notes that it is completely different from the self-portraits he produced in his student years: “Hopper no longer looks like a tortured romantic; instead, he’s an amiable Everyman, peering out from underneath the brim of his hat in an evenly lit bare room. Though the atmosphere is muted, Hopper’s color choices are complex, even eccentric ... dark tie and jacket are both dotted with greenish-yellow accents. In the shadows of his blue shirt are traces of magenta underpainting. The background is made up of patches of pale creamy ochres, greens, and violets, all colliding and canceling one another out.” This painting holds no clues to the fact that Hopper is an artist — no easel or brushes, no hint of a studio. Hopper’s deep blue eyes gaze, not directly at the viewer, but a bit to the side. He wears a cautious expression. Artist and writer Robert Henkes senses “an eloquence, a smoothing quietude, a pensiveness that challenges the viewer ... a puzzling glare that suggests either a subtle beckoning or a quizzical distrust.” In the late 1920s Hopper was enjoying success at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, along with critical acclaim. He had given up the commercial illustration that he so hated. With his marriage in 1924 to Josephine Nivi-

Seven son, another artist, his personal life seemed to be falling into place. Yet it cannot be said, with certainty, that the man in this portrait is secure in his career or in his emotions. In hat, suit and tie, the man in the portrait could be mistaken for a successful salesman, storekeeper, or businessman. “In his stylish, casual attire,” curator Carol Troyen observes, “Hopper presents himself as a man of the world taking its measure, yet because success was so long in coming, he seems not entirely trustful of that success.” Sources: (1) Jeffrey Cudlin, “Squaresville, U.S.A.” (2) Robert Henkes, Themes in American Painting (3) Carol Troyen, “‘A Stranger Worth Talking To’: Proﬁles and Portraits of Edward Hopper.”

Seven A.M. 1948. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — For this painting Hopper used a twostory Victorian white clapboard building several blocks north of his boyhood home in Nyack, New York. The building had served as the village’s ﬁrst post ofﬁce and then a general store. In 1948 it had evolved into a luncheonette/antiques shop. Hopper undoubtedly made preliminary sketches at North Broadway (the architectural details are an exact match to the building today) and then ﬁnished the huge canvas in his South Truro, Cape Cod, studio. There is nothing in the painting to certify the nature of the shop; Hopper shows only some bric-a-brac and photographs in the window to the left. “The picture is divided into two sections,” notes art scholar Rolf Günter Renner, “by the whiteness of the building and the darkness of the woods” at the far left. To Renner, the painting, in part, “is ‘about’ the frontier of Nature and Civilization; the tension draws upon the untamed remoteness of the forest and the domestication represented by the house.” Sources: (1) Laura Fasbach, “Hopper House Up for Sale: Historic building at 318 N. Broadway Is on the market for $450,000” (2) Rolf Günter Renner, Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Transformation of the Real.

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Shakespeare at Dusk 1935. Oil on canvas, 17 ¥ 25 in. (43.2 ¥ 63.5 cm), Collection of Carl D. Lobell — Hopper shows a rear view of the bronze statue of William Shakespeare located at the southern end of New York City’s Central Park mall. The statue was installed in 1864 to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth; over the years the gleaming bronze had turned to green. Before beginning this painting in his Washington Square North studio, Hopper completed twelve sketches on site. He decided to show the aftermath of a November sunset, with a pink glow of sky backing the trees. A gray-blue silhouette of buildings stretches across the back of the park, one building with a red-lit electric sign, another with a large unlit sign, “U.S.” at its top. Dusk can be a melancholy time of day. The mood one senses in Shakespeare at Dusk may well be connected to the death of Hopper’s mother earlier in the year. Source: Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper.

The Sheridan Theatre 1937. Oil on canvas, 171 ⁄ 8 ¥ 251 ⁄ 4 in. (43.5 ¥ 64.1 cm), Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey —The Loew’s Sheridan Theatre opened in 1921 at Seventh Avenue and 11th Street in Greenwich Village in New York City. Hopper captures the theater’s dramatic “movie palace” feeling, described by art scholar Robert Silberman as a “dynamic, exotic space with swooping balconies ... and lighting ﬁxtures that are weird glowing excrescences ... the whole is suffused with a sense of strangeness as well as a sense of quiet fostered by the lack of activity. The stage—in this case, the screen at the front of the theater — is invisible.” The architecture dwarfs the three female ﬁgures: an usher in conversation with a paying customer and, at the right, leaning against a railing, a woman with her back to the viewer. Hopper gives this woman curly blond hair and a bright red skirt. In the movie-crazed 1930s, Ashcan School

123 painters Reginald Marsh and John Sloan were among the many artists depicting moviegoing: throngs of people, bustle and hubbub. Hopper’s movie houses, in contrast, are noiseless, lonely places. When Hopper felt overwhelmed by his surroundings and unable to paint, he found inspiration at the movies. And his ﬁfteen preparatory sketches for The Sheridan Theatre afforded him additional “escape time.” In 2007, when the Newark Museum mounted “At the Movies: Edward Hopper’s ‘The Sheridan Theatre,’” the museum’s curator Mary Kate O’Hare observed, “Hopper always thought of himself as something of an impressionist, and probably saw ‘The Sheridan Theatre’ as ﬁtting into a long line of impressionist paintings about entertainment.” O’Hare added: “There is something about the static poses and half-suggested narrative of the picture that reminds you of the many paintings Edgar Degas did documenting the hours and hours of boredom that go into the preparation of every ballet. He, too, would sometimes catch a strange vignette in an odd corner of a rambling neoclassical hall.” Source: Robert Silberman, “Hopper and the Theater of the Mind.”

silence Hopper’s paintings convey a sense of unnatural stillness, almost like stop action in a ﬁlm. Hopper’s silence, however, is more active than passive because, as English professor J.A. Ward senses, “it suggests little of the calmness, tranquility, or placidity commonly associated with it. Hopper’s silences are tense — hushed decorums maintained with terriﬁc strain ... [and] so emphasized, so dramatized, that is essentially a subject and theme of the work.” Hopper’s friend and fellow artist Charles Burchﬁeld sensed that the element of silence pervaded every one of Hopper’s major works, whatever the medium: “This silence ... is just as evident in the pictures where human beings appear as in those of nothing but buildings. It can vary greatly in its emotional signiﬁcance; it can be impressive or monumental as in Seven A.M., or expectant, as in the stark Ap-

Skyline proaching a City or Dawn in Pennsylvania; it can be almost deadly, as in Room in New York; or it can have in it an element of mystery as in the beautiful Cape Cod Evening.... It is felt just as strongly in Barber Shop where normally one expects all sorts of chatter and activity to go on.” The less Hopper’s paintings said, the more intriguing they became. This applies to Hopper as well. Brian O’Doherty was struck by the gap of time between Hopper’s sentences, his long and deliberate silences: “Everything he said or painted had this delay, as if thinking were a form of hibernation. Like his pictures, he often communicated by reserving comment. His silence invited siege, which he found surprising, for he had nothing to hide — no magic, no secrets. He invited one in to probe it and then left one outside again, the drawbridge up, looking in, unconvinced.” Sources: (1) J.A. Ward, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (2) Charles Burchﬁeld, “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry” (3) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

Skyline Near Washington Square 1925. Watercolor on cardboard, 151 ⁄16 ¥ 219 ⁄16 in. (38.3 ¥ 54.8 cm), Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York—When Hopper painted this watercolor, in 1925, he had yet to move across the hall from his rear fourthﬂoor studio. Looking out the window and over the protruding ﬂat roof, he found his subject, the top two ﬂoors of a freestanding apartment building. Its facade, writes curator Virginia Mecklenburg, “is articulated by engaged columns and pilasters that cast their own dark shadows. The building apparently had been constructed with an adjacent structure in mind since the sidewall was built without windows. Whether its neighbor had been demolished or never built is not indicated, but in Hopper’s view, the building stands starkly alone.” The title Hopper ﬁrst thought of using for this work, Self Portrait, would be puzzling to anyone unfamiliar with the artist’s lanky

Sloan

124

ﬁgure. More than likely, Hopper, at almost 6 feet, 5 inches, felt an afﬁnity for the nearby building that towered over its neighbors. Edward Wales Root, Hopper’s patron and friend, paid the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery $300 for Skyline near Washington Square in 1928.

independence, his artistic integrity. “There has been no radical change in Sloan’s work from the start. It is consistent and of one piece: a characteristic which in some men is an indication of a personal vision so strong and urgent as to allow no time for bypaths.”

Source: Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors.

Source: Edward Hopper, “John Sloan and the Philadelphians.”

Sloan, John (1871 –1951)

Smash the Hun

Like Hopper, Sloan started out as a commercial illustrator. He worked in the art department of the Philadelphia Press with William Glackens, George Luks and Everett Shinn. These four studied with Robert Henri and, after relocating to New York City, they joined an art movement that ﬁrst became known as The Eight and later as the Ashcan School. Hopper ﬁrst met Sloan in 1906 at the New York School of Art, where Sloan was teaching as a substitute for Henri, who was then away on a portrait commission. Sloan became a role model for Hopper. When Hopper took up etching in 1915 he emulated Sloan’s style (Hopper’s 1931 painting Barber Shop, was inspired by Sloan’s 1915 etching of the same subject and title). For his etchings and paintings, Hopper chose subjects that had also attracted Sloan: cityscapes, room interiors, rooftops, and movie theaters. In 1927 Hopper gladly accepted an offer from Lloyd Goodrich, editor of The Arts, to write an article on Sloan. Hopper’s essay shows how closely he identiﬁed with Sloan, who was eleven years his senior. Each had served a long and difﬁcult apprenticeship in commercial illustration. “John Sloan’s development,” Hopper wrote, “has followed the common lot of the painter who through necessity starts his career as a draughtsman and illustrator: ﬁrst the hard grind and the acquiring of sufﬁcient technical skill to make a living, the work at selfexpression in spare time, and ﬁnally the complete emancipation from the daily job when recognition comes. This hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.” Hopper also identiﬁed with Sloan’s sense of

On August 14, 1918, The New York Times reported that “E. Hopper of 3 Washington Sq.” was the winner of the Emergency Fleet Corporation’s poster contest. “Mr. Hopper receives $300. The object of the competition is to obtain the best posters to speed up shipbuilding.” The next day the New York Sun included this statement from Hopper: “I believe in the power of the poster to put over an appeal. I have always been interested in ships. My work has brought me in touch with the shipyards and shipyard workers.... After I hit on my idea for the poster I went to the yards of the Morse Dry Docks ... they permitted a big husky fellow to pose for me. My, but he was ﬁne! I had photographs taken of him and did my work in my studio here. It was ﬁne fun and I enjoyed every minute of it.” The four-color poster shows the ﬁgure of a muscular ship worker (Pete Shea), clad in the coarse garments of his trade, in the act of swinging a huge hammer over his head. The hammer is aimed at three blood-covered German bayonets projecting up from the lower right. There is a silhouette in the background of the shipyard, with smoke curling from a chimney. In his 1922 textbook, Poster Design, Charles Matlack Price explained the reasons why Smash the Hun took ﬁrst prize. Price judged the work to be “a ﬁne example of every poster essential. The color scheme is simple — a yellow sky, with blue silhouette of the shipyard and a sinister touch of red on the threatening enemy bayonets. The ﬁgure is big, dominating, vigorous and full of action, the ideas simple, graphic and symbolic, with a corresponding slogan of excellent comprehension value and memory value.”

125 At age 36, Hopper had, at last, stepped into the spotlight. Although he made the most of it, he must have felt a bit amused (and perhaps disheartened) that his triumph had taken place in the ﬁeld of work — illustration — that he so disdained. Sources: (1) “Awards in Poster Contest,” The New York Times (2) “Pete Shea, Poster Model, Joins Navy,” New York Sun (3) Charles Matlack Price, Poster Design: A Critical Study of the Development of the Poster in Continental Europe, England, and America.

Soir Bleu 1914. Oil on canvas, 36 ¥ 72 in. (91.4 ¥ 182.9 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—In this homage to a Paris, France, carnival, Hopper features Pierrot, a stock comic character of mime. The title (“blue evening”) refers especially to the twilight hour that captured the imagination of nineteenth-century French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, both favorites of Hopper. “Soir Bleu,” writes curator Susan Larsen, is “Hopper’s early attempt to create ... a sophisticated, anti-sentimental allegory of adult city life.” There is nothing spontaneous in this work; it was painted from memory, and all is staged. Larsen says: “Hopper, as dramatist, has assembled a cast of characters and traditional types that play out timeless roles of courtship, solicitation, and tragic self-isolation.” The setting is an outdoor café. The ﬁgures all seem bored; like the ﬁgures in Hopper’s later urban scenes, their faces are mask-like. A well-dressed bourgeois couple — in evening dress—sits at the table to the right. At the center table is a man in a beret (perhaps an artist), another man seen only from the back and, upstaging everyone else, the saddest of clowns. A woman in garish makeup and revealing dress stands at the back, eyeing the café patrons. Seated at the left, a man smokes a cigarette; in notes on a preliminary sketch, Hopper casts him as the woman’s pimp. To Whitney Museum of American Art curator Evelyn Hankins, Soir Bleu is “unique in Hopper’s oeuvre ... its theatrical setup, com-

Solitude plex psychological drama, sexual overtones, and languorously alienated subjects presage what would become the deﬁning elements of Hopper’s mature work and exemplify his ﬂair for combining meticulous observation with personal memories and vivid imagination.” Fifty-two years later, in his ﬁnal painting, Two Comedians, Hopper returned to this theme. There is no mistaking the identity of the clowns, all in white—Edward and Jo Hopper were taking their ﬁnal bows. Sources: (1) Susan Larsen and Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2) Evelyn Hankins, “Edward Hopper: The Paris Years”

Solitary Figure in a Theater* c. 1902–04. Oil on board, 121 ⁄ 2 ¥ 95 ⁄ 16 in. (31.8 ¥ 23.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Antonia Lant, associate professor of ﬁlm studies at New York University, describes the painting: “Hopper conjured a moment between shows.... The stage is empty as are the seats. The curtain seems to sag slightly, catching the light in a modulated way as if swelling under its own weight ... [we see] a female ﬁgure alone, in the front row, her elbow gently propped against an arm rest, her left hand holding something white, perhaps a program or paper ... Hopper apparently created this work in his early twenties, as a student; [it is] one of a group of modest-sized grisaille paintings — exercises in tones, planes, falling light, and the emotions of aloneness.” Hopper had a lifelong love for stage shows and moviegoing. Here, he shows a woman sitting in a darkened theater, alone and in silence. The scene is mysterious, rendered exclusively in gray tones. Long before the debut of ﬁlm noir, Hopper was employing its palette and capturing its mood. Source: Antonia Lant, “The Film Crowd.”

Solitude #56 1944. Oil on canvas, 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm), Private Collection — Hopper began this painting in South Truro, Cape Cod, in September, but found it slow going. He told his

South wife, Jo, that he felt depressed. He resumed the painting upon their return to New York City, and ﬁnished it in December. Jo was unimpressed, ﬁnding the work fragile, inaccessible. Hopper depicts Cape Cod in the late autumn, when the long grass has turned golden. A small white house sits alone in the grass, with tall pine trees in the foreground. Hopper shows a receding stretch of road and, alongside, the house hemmed in by four tall pine trees. Art historian Margaret Iversen ﬁnds the skewed perspective unsettling: “Both the front of the house and the side are represented parallel to the picture plane.” Iversen notes the strange remoteness of the house: “The front windows are shuttered and there is no discernible path to the door.” When Solitude #56 was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art annual exhibition in 1946, art critic Clement Greenberg had mixed feelings for the work. He suggested that “a special category of art should be devised for the kind of thing Hopper does. He is not a painter in the full sense; his means are second hand, shabby, and impersonal. But his rudimentary sense of composition is sufﬁcient for a message that conveys an insight into the present nature of American life for which there is no parallel in our literature, though that insight in itself is literary.” Greenberg then ate his own words: “Hopper’s painting is essentially photography, and it is literary in the best way the best photography is. Like Walker Evans’s and Weegee’s art, it triumphs over inadequacies of the physical medium ... Hopper simply happens to be a bad painter. But if he were a better painter, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist.” Sources: (1) Gail Levin, The Complete Oil Paintings of Edward Hopper (2) Margaret Iversen, “In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny” (3) Clement Greenberg, “Review of the Whitney Annual.”

South Carolina Morning, or Carolina Morning 1955. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This painting shows a woman of

126 color standing in a doorway of a building that looks like it belongs in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. In fact, one of the three preparatory sketches shows a building with a storefront and a tree to the right. The large oil borders on surrealism, the building standing alone on a concrete slab situated in a sea of tall grass. The woman’s posture is deﬁant; arms folded, head tilted back, she looks directly at the viewer. Her attitude suggests racial pride and self-assurance. Her outﬁt — red hat and dress, nylons, black pumps — is provocative. South Carolina Morning’s dreamlike quality may stem from the fact that it was painted from memories stretching back 26 years to the time of Hopper’s 1929 stay in Charleston. Charleston curator Angela Mack ﬁnds this fact important: “Unlike his on-site watercolors that document his immediate response to places he experienced, the images in Edward’s oils are ﬁltered through the world of his imagination. In South Carolina Morning, solitary cabins in the woods, beachfront cottages and shuttered windows coalesce in a single image of the South ... Charleston imagery offered Edward the opportunity to explore his favorite theme, the relationship between interior and exterior worlds.” Source: Angela D. Mack, Edward Hopper in Charleston.

South Truro, Cape Cod Between 1930 and 1966 Edward and Jo Hopper spent almost all their summers on Cape Cod. They were in the most isolated section of the cape, an area that even today is largely undeveloped and noncommercial. The area had what New York City lacked, and what Hopper loved most: solitude and astonishing light. Years later Hopper spoke of Cape Cod to Katharine Kuh: “There’s a beautiful light there—very luminous—perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.” For the ﬁrst four years the Hoppers rented a summer place situated on Truro farmland owned by the postmaster, A.B. Burleigh Cobb. In 1933, drawing on an inheritance from Jo’s uncle, the Hoppers purchased land to build a

127 summer studio at South Truro. The site was 70 feet above sea level, overlooking Cape Cod Bay and distant Provincetown. Brian O’Doherty visited there in the mid-1960s and recorded his impressions: “A rectangular block ... set on a hill, unadorned, clean, bare. The reason it looks so uncannily like a Hopper is because it is a Hopper — he planned it. There is a kitchen, bedroom, a huge studio with a great factory window in the gable facing north.... The interior is austere: greyboarded ﬂoor, with a large heating grill pufﬁng up hot air each time you step over it; a solid red-bricked chimney ... bureaus, chest of drawers, a long mirror, an arm chair, window seat, chaise lounge; a bare easel.” A large door looked out onto the bay, and the land dropped off suddenly, making it seem that one could step out into the water — a view that inspired Hopper’s later painting Rooms by the Sea. The drive up to the house was unpaved, making access difﬁcult — and Hopper seemed to prefer it that way. Hopper produced more paintings of the Cape Cod area than of any other locale except for New York City. Curator Ellen Roberts remarks that Hopper’s Cape Cod paintings “capture something essential about this piece of the American Scene, conveying the particular blend of old and new, man-made and natural, that for Hopper characterized the modern Cape.” At the end of the 1930s, Hopper’s approach to painting began to change, both in South Truro and in New York City. Rather than working from direct observation, he combined actual elements of locales he had visited with what he remembered of them. He also gave up watercolor; a medium that Roberts notes “was not suited to his increasingly imaginative method.” Sources: (1) Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art (3) Ellen E. Roberts, “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro.”

South Truro Church 1930. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm), Private Collection—Hopper painted the

Soyer South Truro Meeting House during the Hoppers’ ﬁrst summer in South Truro, Cape Cod. The church, established in 1794, was replaced in 1831 and again in 1851, when it was enlarged and remodeled with an imposing facade and tall steeple. “The South Truro church,” notes artist and author Gerry Souter, “drew Hopper to it with its stark lines, almost pagoda-like bell tower roof and its classic Greek front attached to the high-ceilinged meeting house. The battered graveyard alongside added to its image of isolation.” Art scholar Kate Rubin compares South Truro Church to the work of Civil War photographer Mathew Brady. Hopper once remarked on Brady in an interview: “There was something about the way he took pictures ... [they] aren’t cluttered up with detail; you just get what is important. Very simpliﬁed.” Hopper’s art, Rubin asserts “was also one of simpliﬁcation, and in Brady’s photographs he seems to have found an approach to American architecture and landscape that paralleled his own.” Rubin sees South Truro Church, “with its simple geometric shape silhouetted against an empty sky,” as a prime example. South Truro Church sold at Sotheby’s New York in 1990 for $2.42 million, then a record for a Hopper painting. Sources: (1) Richard F. Whalen, Truro: The Story of a Cape Cod Town (2) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (3) Kate Rubin, “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination.”

Soyer, Raphael (1899–1987) Born in czarist Russia, Raphael Soyer came to America in 1912 at the age of twelve. He devoted a long and productive life to painting people in their natural context, people who belonged to their time, as in his 1930s portrayals of New York City ofﬁce workers and the unemployed. He was considered one of America’s leading social realists. Soyer ﬁrst came to know Hopper more intimately in 1964 when he chose him as one of the subjects for his Homage to Thomas Eakins. Soyer painted separate likenesses of eleven artists who worked in the tradition of Eakins

Squam and then merged them into a group portrait in what would be his largest painting (88 ¥ 80 inches). Lloyd Goodrich, Hopper’s advocate and friend, is one of the eleven; an artist and art historian, he was a biographer of Eakins. Goodrich remembered that Soyer “told me that he did not intend to include himself, but I pointed out to him that every painter of an homage had done so. In the end he placed himself ... inconspicuously in the left background.... What with getting the sitters to pose, planning the whole composition, and then executing it, the project extended over two and a half years.” In the weeks Hopper posed for Soyer the two entered into conversation and developed a relationship that warmed Hopper in the last three years of life. In 1981 Soyer spoke at length about his time with Hopper: “When I say ‘I knew Hopper,’ what does that mean? Did anybody really know this silent, noncommunicative man? To me he represented the type of humble, honest American painters who worked daily, steadily; in their modest, even austere studios ... I was ﬂattered and moved by the friendship of this seemingly unfriendly, aloof old man. I liked him and admired him, and I recognized his intelligence. In any exhibition of American art, a Hopper stands out, weighty, lonely, and unadorned, like his house, like his easel, like himself.” Sources: (1) Lloyd Goodrich, Raphael Soyer (2) “Six Who Knew Edward Hopper,” Art Journal.

Squam Light 1912. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Private Collection — This was the ﬁrst of Hopper’s many paintings depicting lighthouses. Squam Light shows the lighthouse in Annisquam, a small harbor town near Gloucester, Massachusetts. Carl Little notes that while this painting was “not as dramatic as later renderings, the picture establishes the uphill perspective Hopper would favor; and his penchant for capturing sunlight on white structures begins to manifest itself.” Yves Bonnefoy, French poet and essayist, has an inventive take on the painting. He believes that the starting point of Squam Light

128 “was Hopper’s perception that the houses, the roofs, the two or three boats, the lighthouse, were aspects of his own self.... By means of the color he puts on the canvas ... the painter is able to bring about his own transmutation.... The proof is in the heightened exchanges of colors and values, and in this little red chimney which seems more an act than a thing, more a thought than an appearance, so lively in its joyous conversation with the colors around it.... In Squam Light ... everything in this painting reﬂects the painter, there are no human beings — only a few empty boats. And this characteristic is repeated in all the landscapes that will follow until 1919.” Sources: (1) Carl Little, Edward Hopper’s New England (2) Yves Bonnefoy, “The Photosynthesis of Being.”

Stairway* 1949. Oil on wood, 16 ¥ 117 ⁄ 8 in. (40.6 ¥ 30.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Here, the setting is the stairwell of Hopper’s boyhood home in Nyack, New York. Poet Mark Strand calls the work “a small, eerie painting which looks down a stairway leading to an open door and a dark massing of trees or hills directly outside. Not as rigorously deﬁned spatially as his more mature paintings, it nevertheless mystiﬁes in the same way. The open door becomes not merely a passage connecting inside and outside, but the disturbing link between nowhere and nowhere, or ... a moment that exists between events, the events of leavetaking or arrival.” The years 1948 and 1949 were stressful for Hopper. In 1948 he underwent surgery on his prostate and found it impossible to climb the seventy-four steps to his Washington Square North apartment studio, being forced instead to recuperate at the Grosvenor Hotel on Fifth Avenue. In 1949 he felt the pain return, just as he was beginning to paint Stairway. He was sixty-six years old, facing a health crisis, and at a crossroad. Perhaps Stairway is a show of his anxiety. Source: Mark Strand, “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World.”

129

Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris* 1

1906. Oil on wood, 13 ¥ 9 ⁄4 in. (33 ¥ 23.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper was twenty-four and fresh from his studies with Robert Henri when he made his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, in August of 1906. For months, the city was cold and rainy, and Hopper was limited to painting interior scenes. Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, painted at his Left Bank lodgings, shows the subtle curves of a stairwell and the landing of the ﬂoor above. The composition is offset by a dramatic diagonal sweep of the stairway railing. In keeping with his training under Henri, his palette is dark. And yet, there are signs of experimentation, subtle touches noted by art critic and curator Charles W. Millard: “Particularly handsome is a scene of a stairwell with a ﬂight of brown stairs rising at the left, its treads deﬁned by long, thin strokes of white, a landing at the top, geometrically deﬁned by the rectangle of the door, and the well of a descending ﬂight of stairs to the right, masked by a railing that curves up and across the top landing to tie the entire composition together. As a whole, the composition is a simple, yet sophisticated statement that evidences substantial pictorial abilities and a developed sense of abstract arrangement.” Millard contends that Hopper’s 1906 interiors “were decisive for the development of his art ... these pictures tend to be lighter and more transparent than the immediately preceding American works.” Source: Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper.”

style Hopper’s training under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art and his three trips to Paris, France, honed his technical skills, but did little to help him to establish a distinct style. More helpful was his ten years as an etcher, beginning in 1915. He gradually learned to simplify his composition, and to think through his choice of design elements. As early as March 1927, Lloyd Goodrich recognized that Hopper had become a new force in American art. In his journal, The Arts,

Summer Goodrich wrote that Hopper was an “unusual phenomenon,” a “vigorous and eminently native painter, whose style has already reached maturity.... Self-expression has not come easy to him; he has no taste for the facile depicting of superﬁcialities, and he seems to be incapable of prettifying or compromising his own vision of the world ... Hopper’s painting is not “modern” in the narrow sense.... The vision expressed in his pictures is very much of the average man transformed into something more signiﬁcant.... The power which one feels in his work is all below the surface; it does not manifest itself in violent distortions or in riots of color. His sense of form is ﬁrm, sharp, spare; his color is not sensually seductive, but it is always strong, clear, and ringing, and often of an invigorating brilliance.... Technically, Hopper is one of the most accomplished of contemporary American painters.” Hopper insisted, repeatedly, that he belonged to no school of art. Thought, he contended in a 1956 Time cover story, was far more important than style: “Just to paint a representation or design is not hard, but to express a thought in painting is. Thought is ﬂuid. What you put on canvas is concrete, and it tends to direct the thought. The more you put on canvas the more you lose control of the thought. I’ve never been able to paint what I set out to paint.” Sources: (1) Lloyd Goodrich, “The Paintings of Edward Hopper” (2) “Art: The Silent Witness,” Time.

Summer Evening 1947. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 42 in. (76.2 ¥ 106.7 cm), Private Collection—Hopper shows a young couple on the porch of a wooden clapboard house (most likely that of his boyhood home in Nyack, New York, now the Edward Hopper House Art Center). The girl, in halter and shorts, leans stifﬂy against the porch railing, looking pensive. The boy rests on the railing, next to her but not touching; his body language suggests that all is not well. An overhead porch light throws a harsh white over the scene.

Summer Artist Peter Doig, writing in The Guardian in 1996, had this take on the painting: “Summer Evening depicts a couple on a front porch at night in the countryside.... For an artist who supposedly painted what he saw rather than recreate what he imagined, this is extraordinary. It’s painted from the perspective of a voyeur whose presence is concealed by the blackness of the porch. You the viewer are placed in this black void looking in towards the light, drawn in by the whiteness of the clapboard and reﬂections off the ﬁgures’ ﬂesh. The porch and ﬁgures could be swallowed up by the void. The black space to the right is given added density by the black-hole likeness of the ﬁgures’ eyes ... I like the contemporariness of the ﬁgures; they could have been poster models for the 1948 Nicholas Ray movie They Live By Night. I envy the efﬁciency with which the painting is made: it is ﬂuid, lush, no fuss — just painted. When I look at it for a long time, I start to hear the deafening sound of crickets.” Source: Peter Doig, “Arts: A Brush with Genius.”

Summer in the City 1949. Oil on canvas, 20 ¥ 30 in. (50.8 ¥ 76.2 cm), Private Collection — A feeling of sadness permeates Summer in the City. A woman in a nightgown sits on the edge of her bed, arms on her knees, looking down at the ﬂoor. Her partner lies behind her, his naked shoulders and legs visible. Some critics see the painting as a comment on the Hoppers’ marriage. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd detects “an estranged couple ... immobilized and unable to connect physically and emotionally.” Other interpretations of narrative and mood in Summer in the City are possible. Hopper completed only two paintings in 1948 and four in 1949. Both he and Jo were then in their late sixties. Hopper was depressed by the deaths of friends and associates, and by his own worsening health. This set of factors remained unchanged (or perhaps intensiﬁed) ten years later, when Hopper painted a parallel scene, Excursion into Philosophy, with the genders of the ﬁgures reversed.

130 Source: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Summer Interior 1909. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — This oil, painted by Hopper upon his return to New York City from Paris, France, preﬁgures his later scenes of edgy interiors and lone female nudes. Curator Elliot Bostwick Davis compares Summer Interior to Edgar Degas’s Interior (1868), noting, “The pose of the woman crouching against the bed frame with the bedcovers spilling onto the ﬂoor evokes the same emotional strain as in Degas’ canvas.” Davis also points out the similarity of Hopper’s “marble mantel clock, and glint of yellow shapes on either end suggesting candlesticks” to elements of the room in Degas’s Interior. Like Degas, Hopper catches a woman unawares. Source: Elliot Bostwick Davis, “Hopper’s Foundation.”

Summertime 1943. Oil on canvas, 291 ⁄ 8 ¥ 44 in. (74 ¥ 111.8 cm), Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware —Summertime is one of Hopper’s more powerfully seductive scenes. A young woman has emerged from an apartment building into bright sunshine. She is framed by two stone columns, and rests her hand on one of them as she waits on the steps. Curator Carol Troyen comments on the sexiness of the painting, observing that the woman’s dress, “a white frock, normally associated with sweetness and innocence” is “inexplicably, shockingly sheer, tight, and revealing.” Yet, in its early stages, Summertime had nothing to do with sex. One preparatory sketch shows no woman at all, and much more of the building, including elaborate designs over the entranceway and windows; another shows a woman dressed more demurely. Hopper later omitted the decorative architecture and instead highlighted the woman’s ﬁgure, using Jo Hopper as the model. The similarity between Summertime and two later Hopper paintings, High Noon (1949)

131 and South Carolina Morning (1955), is striking — each depicts an alluring young woman standing at an open doorway in revealing dress, gazing at the sun. Source: Carol Troyen, “Hopper’s Women.”

Sun in an Empty Room 1963. Oil on canvas, 283 ⁄4 ¥ 391 ⁄ 2 in. (73 ¥ 100.3 cm), Private Collection—Katharine Kuh, who knew Hopper well, considers Sun in an Empty Room to be a “terse résumé” of Hopper himself. The painting, she writes, “is solidly, almost geometrically constructed, and proves once again how less can be more.” This is Hopper’s most austere painting. He shows a completely empty room, a window opening onto a thick mass of trees and, most important, the severe light of the sun. Interestingly, he had included a ﬁgure in one preliminary sketch, before ruling it out. “I’ve always been intrigued by an empty room,” he told Brian O’Doherty. “When we were at school, [Guy Pène] du Bois and Rockwell Kent and others debated about what a room looked like when there was nobody to see it, nobody looking in even ... I’d done so much with the ﬁgure I decided to leave the ﬁgure out.” Hopper was known for his ability to manipulate light to suggest the time of day or the season of the year. Sun in an Empty Room was painted in October in the South Truro, Cape Cod, studio. Late in the year, the sun becomes a “poignant harbinger of death,” argues critic Martha Bayles, “which does its best to reach us with its old force but cannot, because of inexorably increasing distance. The trees outside the window of Hopper’s empty room are still green, but the painting’s autumnal mood is accentuated by the quality of the light.” Emily Genauer, art critic for the New York Herald Tribune, reacted to the painting soon after it was completed: “How could Hopper, never wavering even in his 83rd year from pursuing his ideal of realism, have turned out to be so close to abstraction? ... ‘Sun in an Empty Room’ is ... a precisely painted room. But the cold, harsh, immobile ﬁgures with which Hopper so long populated his compositions,

Sunday are gone. There are only blank walls left, and on them rectangular patches of brilliant sun, echoing the pattern of a window. And the only conclusion one can draw is that reality itself has changed for Hopper. It is no longer rooms and buildings and people shaped by the fall of light, but light itself, symbol of life and a mystical force that theologian Paul Tillich has called ‘ultimate reality.’” Sources: (1) Katharine Kuh, My Love Affair with Modern Art (2) Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art (3) Martha Bayles, “Hopper’s World: Solitude, Light, and Harbingers of Death” (4) Emily Genauer, “Edward Hopper at Whitney.”

Sun on Prospect Street 1934. Oil on canvas, 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 361 ⁄ 4 in. (71.4 ¥ 92.1 cm), Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio — This painting, created by Hopper in his Washington Square North studio, replicates his 1928 watercolor, Prospect Street, Gloucester. The mood created in the oil is far different from that of the watercolor, and Hopper in later years confessed that he preferred the more evocative 1928 version. “In their boldness, directness, and blatant obviousness,” writes English professor J.A. Ward, “Hopper’s paintings seem to attack us. Hopper worked for increasing clarity of line and sharpness of distinction. One might contrast the earlier and later versions of Sun on Prospect Street to remark the total elimination of impressionistic blurring of edges in the more recent painting.” The oil was purchased in 1940 by the stage and ﬁlm star Edward G. Robinson. Robinson owned a large collection of French impressionist and modern abstract art, and his decision to purchase Sun on Prospect Street was something of a departure, and another boost to Hopper’s career. Source: J.A. Ward, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans and Edward Hopper.

Sunday 1926. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 34 in. (73.7 ¥ 86.4 cm), The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.— Hopper found these tired storefronts

Sunlight and wooden sidewalk in Hoboken, New Jersey. Sunday shows a man sitting at a curb, either chewing on or smoking a cigar. The sunlight falls upon his sharply outlined bald head and collarless white shirt. He is oddly downsized, as if overwhelmed by his circumstances. The empty street and the darkened store windows suggest a neighborhood that has seen better days. Art historian Robert Hobbs senses that Sunday “allows the viewer the option of choosing alternative meanings: the picture can be taken as a pleasant scene of a middle-aged man pufﬁng on a cigar and enjoying the sunlight, or it can be regarded as a picture that presents indirectly the unprosperous side of the 1920s.” Once again, Hopper transforms a mundane scene into one that affects the mind and, at the same time, pleases the eye. Curator Carol Troyen notes that “Hopper’s thin, scrubby paint handling perfectly evokes the shafts of dusty light penetrating the empty display spaces. He generalizes the windows and doorways into a series of quietly colored rectangles,” thereby creating “an elegant structure of geometry and light.” Duncan Phillips, who acquired this painting for the Phillips Collection, looks at Sunday and wonders at the genius of Hopper: “The light conveys the emotion which is a blend of pleasure and depression — pleasure in the way the notes of yellow, blue-green, gray-violet and tobacco-brown take on a rich intensity in the clear air — and depression induced by this same light and these same colors as we sense them through the boredom of the solitary sitter on the curb ... Hopper deﬁes our preconceptions of the picturesque and unﬂinchingly accepts the challenge of American subjects which seem almost too far beyond the scope even of the realistic artist’s alchemy.” Sources: (1) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper (2) Carol Troyen, “ ‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City” (3) Richard L. Rubenfeld, “American Scene: Realism and Social Concern.”

Sunlight in a Cafeteria 1958. Oil on canvas, 403 ⁄16 ¥ 601 ⁄8 in. (102.1 ¥ 152.7 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New

132 Haven, Connecticut—Hopper’s thirteen charcoal and graphite preliminary drawings for this painting indicate that his top priority is composition and light. In one, he shows the ﬁgures more prominently (three ﬁgures instead of two), a man gazing at a woman nearby, and a second woman seated at another table. In the completed painting the ﬁgures are downsized, so that the viewer’s eye is drawn to the large geometric forms, the ﬂat masses of color, the strong verticals, horizontals and diagonals and, above all, the conspicuous light. The man and the woman in this large-scale geometric composition become, like the potted plant in the window, little more than props. Filling a huge canvas, Sunlight in a Cafeteria becomes three paintings in one, a triptych. Seen through the cafeteria window on the left is a dull gray downtown building; at the center is a ﬂoor-to-ceiling wall, much of it in sunlight; the ﬁnal third of the painting is in shadow, broken only by a diagonal of sunlight crossing over from the center section. Sunlight in a Cafeteria was purchased by one of Hopper’s earliest patrons, Stephen Carlton Clark, in September 1958 for $9,000. Source: “Sunlight in a Cafeteria.” Yale University Art Gallery.

Sunlight on Brownstones 1956. Oil on canvas, 303 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (77.2 ¥ 101.9 cm), Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas — Hopper made several sketches of apartments and then completed this work in his Washington Square North studio. We see a well-dressed couple standing at the entrance to a New York City brownstone. Both the man, in the doorway, and the woman, a few steps below, seem transﬁxed as they gaze out into the sunlight. “Hopper effectively captures the boredom of this couple on a hot summer’s day,” notes art critic Ita Berkow. “Ironically, the warmth of the sun does not lessen the emotional distance between the couple.” Jo Hopper noted in the ledger book that the morning sun made the brownstone look pink. The pink brownstone is only one of the painting’s oddities. Things seem out of kilter. Win-

133 dows and doors are (impossibly) the same height, and crowded together; the railings go down at an angle that is too steep; the banisters appear to widen as they descend; the apartment itself seems to lean backwards at an angle. These quirks contribute to the painting’s disquieting and almost surrealistic mood. In fact, the techniques in Sunlight on Brownstones resemble those used in the early work of Giorgio de Chirico: warm color, bright sunlight, deep shadows, empty walkways, varying lines of perspective. Source: Berkow, Ita G. Edward Hopper: An American Master.

surrealism French surrealist André Breton ﬁrst saw the work of Edward Hopper in 1941. Curator Carol Troyen relates that Breton recognized in Hopper a kindred spirit, one who valued dreams and unconscious thought more than conscious realities. That year Breton told an interviewer his impressions of Hopper’s New York Movie: “The beautiful young woman, lost in a dream beyond the confounding things happening to others, the heavy mythical column, the three lights ... seem charged with a symbolic signiﬁcance.” Some art critics suggest that Hopper learned much from the surrealists. Martha Bayles is one: “From de Chirico he took the deserted cityscape divided between brilliant light and profound shadow. From Magritte he took the strangely altered ordinary scene. Consider the odd, disproportionately small scale of the ﬁgures in Sunday (1926) and Gas (1940), or, in Rooms by the Sea (1951), the unnerving sight of a door opening directly onto midocean.” Hopper had an afﬁnity for the outlook of the surrealists but not for their techniques, especially their reliance on automatism, where the artist’s hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper, free of rational control, allowing images to emerge by chance or by accident. Hopper’s approach was far different: For his paintings, he relied on memory and on preparatory sketches.

Symbolism Sources: (1) Carol Troyen, “Hopper’s Women” (2) Martha Bayles, “Hopper’s World: Solitude, Light, and Harbingers of Death.”

symbolism A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art deﬁnes symbolism as “a loosely organized movement in literature and the visual arts, ﬂourishing c. 1885–c. 1910, characterized by a rejection of direct literal representation in favor of evocation and suggestion ... Symbolist painters tried to give visual expression to emotional experiences.” Hopper’s training under Robert Henri at the New York School of Art alerted him to symbolism; Henri’s interest in that movement can be seen in the following classroom comment transcribed by one of his students in 1912: “I don’t care for drawing. I don’t care for color; I don’t care for composition, excepting as they serve me as servants, helping me to carry out my purpose which is not to do any of these things well, but to express myself when I see most truly and most simply.” In 1939 Hopper expressed an identical thought: “To me, form, color, and design are merely a means to an end, the tools I work with, and they do not interest me greatly for their own sake. I am interested primarily in the vast ﬁeld of experience and sensation ... my aim in painting is ... to try to project upon canvas my most intimate reaction to the subject as it appears.” Hopper’s paintings often evoke a sense of isolation, and more than a dash of mystery. One example is Soir Bleu (1914); art historian Robert Hobbs calls it an “excursion into French symbolism: it represents an attempt to give form to the subtle melancholy of modern life and to ﬁnd an abstract equivalent for a speciﬁc feeling in terms of the color blue.” “Hopper never would have deemed himself a symbolist,” art historian Pamela Koob writes. “He did not leave us with any explicit statements about symbolism’s inﬂuence on his work — only tantalizing parallels in his few comments ... yet the climate in which he emerged as an artist was imbued with symbolist priorities, such as the creative role of

Tables consciousness, intellectual and emotional content, and the use of suggestion, ambiguity, and expressive form.” Sources: (1) Ian Chilvers (ed.), A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art (2) Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (3) Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper (4) Pamela Koob, “States of Being: Edward Hopper and Symbolist Aesthetics.”

Tables for Ladies 1930. Oil on canvas, 481 ⁄4 ¥ 601 ⁄ 4 in. (122.6 ¥ 153 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—Hopper painted this huge canvas in his Washington Square North studio, working from sketches he had made at local restaurants. Writing about Tables for Ladies in 1950, Charles Burchﬁeld observed, “Hopper has somehow managed to take a particular moment, a split second almost, to make time stand still, and to give the moment an enduring, universal signiﬁcance.” While universal, the painting also reﬂects its own time, the late 1920s, when women such as the cashier and waitress in this scene were taking on new roles and new status. “Tables for Ladies” signs were being posted at Manhattan eateries and, at long last, unescorted women in restaurants were no longer assumed to be prostitutes. Hopper shows a restaurant with wall mirrors, polished woodwork, and a ﬂoor of checkerboard white and blue tiles. He places the viewer directly outside the front window, looking in at a vivid display of grapefruit and other foods. A man and woman occupy one table, a cashier is busy at the register, and a waitress attends to the window display. It was during the painting of Tables for Ladies that Jo and Edward Hopper ﬁrst began their custom of naming the ﬁgures in Hopper’s works. Here, the couple is “Max Scherer and wife Sadie,” the cashier is “Anne Popebogales,” and the waitress is “Olga.” Sources: (1) Charles Burchﬁeld, “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry” (2) Deborah Lyons, Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work.

Talbot’s House 1926. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Private Collection — Hop-

134 per found this subject, a large Victorian residence, in Rockland, Maine. Art historian Virginia Mecklenburg implies that he was attracted to its “mansard roof and elaborate cornices, ﬁnials, and window detailing.” By showing both the front and side of the house, and by cropping the widow’s walk at the top and the porch at the bottom, Hopper releases the structure from its surroundings and turns this elegant home into something of an intimidating force. Talbot’s House “is typical of Hopper’s hulking mansions,” writes art critic Diana Loercher, “that seem to assume a personality of their own. Here again windows provide a consistent visual key to his work, for the windows ... seem to stare out from the canvas like gaping eyes.” Some of this effect, Loercher feels, is due to the fact that Hopper was working in watercolor rather than in oils: “His watercolors, which he uses primarily for landscapes and the exteriors of houses, possess an airy translucence that elevates the underlying somberness of mood whereas he uses oil to give his compressed interiors and street scenes a lusterless, opaque texture.” Sources: (1) Virginia Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (2) Diana Loercher, “Hopper’s Windows Overlook Maine.”

Tall Masts 1912. Oil on canvas, 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art — In 1981 art critic Charles W. Millard took a long look at Tall Masts: “The vertical pilings of the shadowed foreground are played off against the masts above and behind them catching the sunlight. Between the two, the tonally contrasted horizontal shapes of boats’ decks and the broad planes of a shed ﬁll in and close up the pictorial space. Despite the fact that the picture is an outdoors scene — indeed, a sort of seascape — natural elements are almost completely suppressed, appearing only in a small and partially obscured view of water and coast at the left. The sky, which would otherwise occupy an inordinate amount of the canvas, is kept under control by the web of rigging

135 and masts, some of them reaching to the top of the canvas.” Hopper was leaving Paris, France, behind. His brushwork now tended toward long strokes that followed forms that were often geometric. His color became richer, more mixed and composed of vibrant off-hues. “Having discovered both sunlight and himself in Paris,” Millard writes, “Hopper spent the second decade of [the] century consolidating his gains.” Source: Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper.”

Tittle, Walter Ernest (1883–1966) Born in Springﬁeld, Ohio, Tittle came to New York City in the early 1900s to study art under Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art. Although he began his career as an illustrator, Tittle later became well known for portrait sketches of celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford as well as four U.S. presidents, Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, and Franklin Roosevelt. In 1948 he published Roosevelt As an Artist Saw Him, a book based on his conversations with the 32nd president. Tittle ﬁrst came to know Hopper as a classmate in art school, where he became the target of Hopper’s jokes. Like Tittle, Hopper had been raised in a strict household; nevertheless, he found it amusing that Tittle’s father would allow him to participate in life drawing classes only if the model was a male. In 1909 Tittle rented a studio at 3 Washington Square North. Unhappy with the noise and partying in the building, he was delighted when Hopper took an apartment there in 1913. The two remained neighbors for 13 years. When in 1915 Hopper needed work in illustration, Tittle referred him to Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, the art director for the trade journal Farmer’s Wife. Not long after, Hopper took up etching, and began to nag Tittle to do the same. Tittle resisted, but agreed to pose for Hopper, who completed two etchings, Portrait of Walter Tittle, or The Illustrator in 1918 and Walter Tittle Drawing. Tittle ﬁnally caved in, took up etch-

Two ing, and returned the favor, creating a drypoint, Portrait of Edward Hopper. He went on to produce drypoint portraits of notables in Europe and North America. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Train and Bathers 1920. Etching on copper. Platemark: 85 ⁄ 16 ¥ 913 ⁄ 16 in. (21.1 ¥ 25 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Hopper shows two naked women hiding behind bushes to avoid being seen by passengers on an oncoming train. High on a bridge, the train’s engine becomes a cartoon — its headlight “eye” turns toward the bathers, it puffs smoke and bends off the track as it passes over the women below. The theme of voyeurism implied in this and other Hopper etchings recurs in many of his later works. Artist and author Gerry Souter writes that “Hopper had discovered a small company of characters in his etchings ... mostly women at ﬁrst.... These artistic creations in his etchings resonated as ... as voyeuristic glimpses beneath Hopper’s shell. Critics saw in his work a fresh approach to a medium that had become more than a bit stuffy.” Source: Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark.

Two Comedians 1965. Oil on canvas, 29 ¥ 40 in. (73.7 ¥ 101.6 cm), Private Collection —“Hopper was aware of his oncoming death,” writes art historian Robert Hobbs. “He was ill for some time and he symbolized his passing by creating a farewell picture entitled Two Comedians.” Edward and Jo Hopper are the mimes spotlighted on a darkened stage, taking their ﬁnal bows. Hobbs notes that “the tall comedian bows and gestures to the female, who shyly stands a little behind him and points back to him.” Hobbs senses that Hopper needed to acknowledge Jo Hopper’s contributions in what had been a collaborative venture. Jo had prodded him to select his subjects, had posed as his female ﬁgures, and had been his archivist, agent, and social secretary. All matters

Two involving the execution of a painting remained with Edward Hopper. Looking at this painting, one can almost hear Frank Sinatra crooning “My Way.” In fact Sinatra’s wife, Barbara, became the owner of Two Comedians. Like Sinatra, Hopper insisted on living life and art on his own terms. Source: Robert Hobbs, Edward Hopper.

Two on the Aisle 1927. Oil on canvas, 401 ⁄4 ¥ 481 ⁄ 4 in. (102.2 ¥ 122.6 cm), Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio —Two on the Aisle depicts a man and woman in formal attire taking their seats near a theater stage. Another woman, dressed in red, is seated in a box at the right, reading a program. A heavy curtain and an orchestra pit form the background. The overall design is reminiscent of art nouveau, with its repeating swirl of curves and arcs. Although Hopper depicts a lavish theater, his choice of color— predominately blue-gray—creates a cool, emotionless setting. The man is the painting’s focal point. He seems to be transﬁxed, almost unable to complete the act of removing his coat. Is there something catching his attention? Writer and artist John Clark suggests that the man’s frozen action “seems to ﬁll him with some overwhelming uncertainty. It is as if his whole existence is being questioned as he looks about him in a bemused way. What appeared normal is suddenly fraught with doubt.” Clark is caught up in Hopper’s trick of staging a drama of routine daily life played out by selfabsorbed strangers. Two on the Aisle sold for $1,500 in 1927, and enabled Hopper to purchase his ﬁrst automobile— a used 1925 Dodge. Source: John Clark, “Edward Hopper: Beyond Style.”

Two Puritans 1945. Oil on canvas, 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm), Private Collection — The Hoppers were summering in Cape Cod when Hopper conceived and planned out this painting. He spotted a tall and stately house in the town of

136 Orleans and made a preliminary drawing. After starting a charcoal composition on canvas, he returned to Orleans for further sketches. While there, he came upon a second, smaller house standing alongside Route 6 and incorporated it into his design: two white houses side by side behind three bare tree trunks. By the 1940s Hopper had fallen into the habit of infusing personality into his architecture. “Even without the title,” art critic Roberta Smith notes, “the stoic, slightly crosseyed stare communicated by the ﬁrst house’s heavy-lidded windows says it all.” Two Puritans, artist and author Gerry Souter suggests, is “a title possibly drawn from several sources, for example Edward and Jo’s ‘puritan’ approach to life, or the purity of the setting. If the former, the big house is Edward with the allseeing windows and the little house is Jo.” Others have pinned the label “puritan” on Hopper. His good friend, Guy Pène du Bois, always considered Hopper to be puritanical, “the most inherently Anglo-Saxon painter of all times”— but with a twist. Hopper, du Bois argued, “turned the Puritan in him into a purist, turned moral rigours into stylistic precisions.” Sources: (1) Roberta Smith, “Review/Art: The Real World and Edward Hopper” (2) Gerry Souter, Edward Hopper: Light and Dark (3) Guy Pène du Bois, Edward Hopper.

Universalist Church 1926. Watercolor on paper, 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm), Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey—Here, Hopper makes dramatic use of the 100-foot tower of the Universalist Meeting House. The meetinghouse, built in 1805, was the oldest church building in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the ﬁrst Universalist congregation in America. From his perspective near the corner of Church and Middle Streets, looking up, Hopper captured the geometric patterns of the tops of houses fronting the church. These housetops frame the gleaming white church tower rising beyond. Universalist Church, “with its tight conﬁnement of perspective and camera-

137 like focus,” writes art critic Meredith Lewis, “might be called the very essence of Hopper. There is a striking sense of isolation about the old colonial tower of the church, cast in a familiar glare of sunlight, an isolation that characterizes many of the turrets, belfries, towers and lighthouses throughout Hopper’s oeuvre.” Source: Meredith Lewis, “West to Wesselmann: American Drawings and Watercolors in the Princeton University Art Museum.”

Valley of the Seine 1909. Oil on canvas, 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Painted from memory, Valley of the Seine is a panoramic view of the French countryside near Paris, France. In the style of French impressionism, Hopper uses short, quick brush strokes and vivid unmixed colors, and merely suggests clusters of village life. The painting also reﬂects an American design formula made famous by early nineteenthcentury Hudson River School artists such as Thomas Cole or Asher B. Durand: mountains in the distance rising into a misty sky, water winding its way through the middle ground and, in the foreground, greater attention to detail. No writer on Hopper has ever identiﬁed what seems to be a tiny upcropping of mountain into the sky at the very center of the painting. This focal point on the horizon may very well be Montmartre in Paris, as seen from many miles away in St. Germaine-en-Laye. Perhaps it is this “hybrid” style that causes art critic Charles Millard to deem the painting “almost completely unsuccessful, playing to most of Hopper’s weaknesses.” Millard was unsparing in his criticism: “The picture attempts to depict an atmospheric distant view in which nothing predominates except the brilliantly white aqueduct at the left. Coloristically unsubtle, clumsily modulated, and largely without atmosphere, the painting goes hard and dry and was clearly an attempt to deal in effects that were basically unsympathetic to the artist.” Source: Charles W. Millard, “Edward Hopper.”

Vermeer

Verlaine, Paul (1844–96) Hopper was ﬁrst encouraged to read Verlaine by his painting instructor at the New York School of Art, Robert Henri. After teaching himself French during his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, in 1906–07, Hopper began reading Verlaine in the original. In 1915 and the years following he did a number of sketches of Jeanne Cheruy, a French woman living in New York City, and in 1922 she presented him with a gift volume of Verlaine’s poems in French. Hopper treasured the book; he saw Verlaine as the essence of symbolism, and of the importance of the artist’s intimate relationship with his inner world — his creative imagination. Painting in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1923, Hopper began keeping company with Josephine Nivison, another artist. On one of their outings, Hopper began a quote in French from Verlaine, and was astonished when Nivison completed the quote, also in French. As husband and wife, they continued their passion for all things French, including Verlaine. Source: Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.

Vermeer, Jan (1632–75) Several centuries separate the art of Hopper and the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, yet a number of critics sense an afﬁnity between the two. Art critic Philip Leider writes “Hopper keeps Vermeer before our eyes by evoking ... his light, his simplicity and his composition. By simplicity I mean here only that there are rarely more than two ﬁgures in a work of either of these artists, and that the ﬁgures are never shown in action.” Both men painted interior scenes featuring a lone woman. Vermeer’s women are sometimes smiling, sometimes pensive; they are often shown full-face and occasionally looking directly at the viewer. Hopper’s women, in contrast, are unspeciﬁc, expressionless. They almost never look at the viewer, and their faces are often hidden in shadow.

View The setting of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (1669) and Hopper’s Girl at a Sewing Machine is comparable; in both paintings women ply their skills, intent on their tasks. However, the face in Girl at a Sewing Machine is completely buried in her hair. Source: Philip Leider, “Vermeer & Hopper.”

View Across Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris* 1906. Oil on wood, 13 ¥ 95 ⁄8 in. (33 ¥ 24.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—A view from Hopper room at the Baptist mission on his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, in the fall of 1906. His muted blue-gray palette is in keeping with the long stretch of dark and rainy days he was then experiencing. When this painting was shown at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2003, it received this description from local reporter Scott Lucas: “A handrail cuts across the bottom of the canvas. A stucco building rises to a black mansard roof. A triangular patch of light is squeezed at the top of the canvas. Each line of color is made with a single brush stroke, and each stroke is unﬂinching and assured. Windowsills, mullions and rooﬂines are executed with an intuitive accuracy. [Hopper] experiments with an expressionistic brush stroke and with the intimate ‘cozy’ feel of the inanimate structure wrestled from stark geometry of planes of light and dark.” View Across Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris was one of several small oils completed by Hopper during that fall and winter. Lucas describes them as “close cropped, closed in and still portraits of places without people ... Paris Street* and Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris* carry the hints of the paradoxical juxtapositions for which we remember Hopper today. Interiors are spatially expansive, but psychologically cramped; objects are dense with the tangible weight of place, but nearly, often completely, vacant. Places are clean, neat and well lit, but so damn sad. It feels like no one has walked here in years.” Source: Scott Lucas, “Edward Hopper Moments: Paintings from the Artist as a Young Man.”

138

Washington Square North In 1913 Hopper moved to 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he remained until his death in 1967. The neighborhood teemed with artists, writers and intellectuals, and living in Hopper’s 1830s Greek Revival row house were two of his New York School of Art classmates, Walter Tittle and Rockwell Kent (other renters of note at 3 Washington Square down through the years included Thomas Eakins, John Dos Passos and e.e. cummings). Hopper’s studio was atop the four-story building, and for the next half-century he would climb the 74 steps connecting the street to his apartment. The dwelling was heated only by a potbellied stove. He shared a hallway bathroom with other tenants. Although the building fronted on Washington Square Park, Hopper’s apartment was at the rear, where his view was limited to the roofs of other buildings. Josephine Nivison moved into the apartment following their marriage in 1924. Eight years later, the couple moved across the hall into a larger apartment, gaining a skylight and a panoramic view of the park. Eventually, in 1941, they obtained a private bathroom, and central heating in 1959. The space was always more a studio than an apartment, as Brian O’Doherty notes: “It had some of the asceticism of a tidied-up carpenter’s workroom. Beside the stove was a printing press; Hopper’s hat usually hung on one of its four spokes. In front of the press stood an easel he had made himself. There was no art to be seen — only a mirror on the wall.” At a time when Hopper was achieving a name in the art world, New York University, Washington Square’s largest landlord, negotiated a twenty-one-year lease for 1 –3 Washington Square North. In 1946 NYU ﬁled petitions with the Ofﬁce of Price Administration (OPA) for permission to evict all tenants occupying the three buildings. The artists and writers who lived and worked there called upon the OPA to save their homes. The Hoppers, and especially Jo, became involved in the

139 protest. Hearings were held, briefs submitted and in the end the tenants won out over the university. Today the three buildings belong to New York University, which has completed $5 million in interior renovations for its new Center for Social Work. And yet Hopper’s studio has been preserved much as it was when he lived there. The studio apartment now serves as a seminar room for New York University students and faculty, and from time to time it is placed on public view. Source: Brian O’Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art.

watercolor The fact that Hopper’s fame is tied to his iconic oil paintings should not diminish his accomplishments in watercolor. His good friend Charles Burchﬁeld, a celebrated American watercolorist, understood this: “His watercolors seem less concerned with human activities and show more of Hopper’s concern for pure beauty of form and texture. They have a clarity ... there is a certain afﬁnity with the watercolors of Winslow Homer, whose work Hopper is said to admire so much. They reveal the artist’s reactions to his material in so individual a manner that they stand apart in the whole ﬁeld of American watercolors.” Hopper painted his ﬁrst known watercolor, The Race*, at age 11. Over the next seven years (1893–1900) he completed 22 watercolors (including a gouache of his father, Garret Henry Hopper) and 8 oils. Seemingly, watercolor was Hopper’s earliest preference. This changed when he began his formal studies at the New York School of Art in 1901, where the consensus held that ﬁne artists painted in oil and that watercolor was “female art.” From 1901 to the time of his ﬁrst trip to Paris, France, in 1906 he executed 119 oils (most of them as classwork) and only 2 watercolors. When Hopper arrived in Paris in October of 1906 it was cold and rainy, and he was forced to paint indoors. He painted interiors and nearby street scenes in oil. Then, in watercolor, he painted 33 caricatures of French

Watercolor men and women in various costumes. In the spring of 1907, under the bright Paris sun, he completed 4 oils on wood and 19 oils on canvas. His 10 paintings done in Paris in 1909 were also oils. From 1907 to 1922 Hopper completed 105 paintings, every one an oil except for a watercolor Self-Portrait in 1910. He exhibited many of these oils continuously over these years in an attempt to gain recognition as a ﬁne artist, but only one painting sold, Sailing, in 1913. Watercolor took on new meaning in 1923 when he summered in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He fell into the company of Josephine Verstille Nivison, an artist skilled in watercolors. Nivison urged Hopper to put aside his oils and paint in watercolor. That summer he completed 17 watercolors. Later that year, at Jo’s insistence, Hopper entered six watercolors into an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The watercolors drew wide critical acclaim, the New York Herald Tribune calling them “exhilarating.” The Brooklyn Museum purchased one of them, The Mansard Roof, for its permanent collection. At the age of 42 Hopper was, at long last, gaining recognition as a ﬁne artist. The Mansard Roof was the thirteenth watercolor Hopper painted in the summer of 1923. He had come a long way in only a few months. Carol Troyen feels that Hopper’s ﬁrst painting that summer, Eastern Point Light, was unexceptional: “He worked on a block of watercolor paper of medium weight and standard size (fourteen by twenty inches), trimming the sheet slightly when the composition warranted. The paper was relatively smooth, allowing him to lay in his washes freely.... [He] maintained reasonable control over the independent-minded wash but had a little difﬁculty creating a legible transition between the grassy dunes in the foreground and the buildings resting on them. Similarly, he did not fully master the sky, leaving halos of reserved paper around the low clouds, which cause them to project improbably.... His composition also reﬂects his newness to watercolor as a plein-air medium.”

Watson In 1927 Lloyd Goodrich, then an art critic, devoted ﬁve pages to Hopper’s art. He felt that Hopper had found himself in watercolor: “We hear a great deal about austerity nowadays, and some of our painters are trying to achieve it by painting like fourteenth century Italians; but Hopper’s austerity is a more instinctive affair. It is not the bloodless austerity of the would-be primitive but the positive austerity of an artist who hates insincerity, false emotion, and superﬂuous decoration. But while it pervades his whole work, entering into his choice of subject, his style, even his brushwork, it has never become a mannerism. Judging by his latest paintings, there is little danger of his work becoming stylized.” Goodrich went on to say that Hopper’s watercolors had the “brilliancy of Sargent, but it is a solid brilliancy, with a force of mind rather than of hand behind it. The touch is ﬁrm, crisp, almost neat, with something in it that reminds one less of Sargent than of Winslow Homer.” Between 1925 and 1965 Hopper completed 241 watercolors. And yet, only 6 of his 40 paintings after 1946 were in watercolor. He once explained the reasons for his late-in-life preference for painting in oil: “My watercolors are all done from nature — direct — out–of-doors and not made as sketches. I do very few these days; I prefer working in my studio. More of me comes out when I improvise. You see, the watercolors are quite factual.” Hopper was 83 years old when he painted his last known watercolor, Cape Cod Bay. Sources: (1) Charles Burchﬁeld, “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry” (2) Carol Troyen, “Hopper in Gloucester” (3) Lloyd Goodrich, “The Paintings of Edward Hopper.”

Watson, Forbes (1880–1960) Watson and Hopper forged a relationship that lasted forty years. Watson served as art critic for the New York Evening Post (1911 –17) and the New York World (1918–31), and as lecturer at the Art Students League. While writing for the World he also became chief editor of The Arts (1923–33). Lloyd Goodrich, who joined The Arts as a writer in 1925, re-

140 called Watson as “a vital, brilliant, witty person, and a wonderful ﬁghter for things he believed in.” A staunch admirer of Hopper’s work, Watson wrote an article in Vanity Fair in 1929 praising Hopper’s “dry wit” and “depth of feeling for purely native material,” and throwing in this bombshell: “Through the hysterical period of American art when the ﬁrst rush to be modern took place ... Edward Hopper stalked, a quiet, slightly sneering, silently honest ﬁgure of obstinacy ... he looked down with inﬁnite disgust upon those who, ceasing to be themselves, were rushing to get aboard the bandwagon of modernism.” Hopper, Watson wrote, “refused to listen to the noisy demands for professorial painting. His paintings, his water colors and his etchings remained just Hopper.” Sources: (1) Lenore Clark, Forbes Watson: Independent Revolutionary (2) Forbes Watson, “A Note on Edward Hopper” (3) Lloyd Goodrich and Garnett McCoy, “Lloyd Goodrich Reminisces, Part I.”

Wenders, Wim (b. 1945) Hopper’s art is central to many of the ﬁlms directed by Wenders, a principal architect of German New Wave cinema. In his early twenties Wenders moved to Paris, France, to study painting and engraving; he once declared, “All of my ﬁlms have been driven ﬁrst by my love for painting before anything else.” His passion for Hopper began while visiting America in 1972: “I was in New York and spent quite some time at the Whitney Museum [of American Art] ... I had known Hopper a little before, but he hadn’t made much of an impact on me until I actually saw the paintings.... The ﬁrst ﬁlm of mine that was inﬂuenced by Edward Hopper’s paintings was The American Friend, which I shot in 1976. More than anything else I liked his sense of framing. It was very cinematic.” For The American Friend, Wenders chose ﬁlm stock and lenses that enabled him to obtain a charged atmosphere and Hopperesque images. Hopper’s impact on Wenders persisted. One scene in The End of Violence (1977) is a

141 live recreation of Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks. A shot in Reverse Angle (1982) shows the painting Morning in a City. The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), Wenders says, is where “Hopper’s inﬂuence shows most.... The entire ﬁlm was shot in a brownstone building that could have served as Hopper’s studio.” Don’t Come Knocking (2005), according to Wenders, is a “tribute to Hopper.... You’ve noticed that in Hopper there are no windows and so we played with lighting and ﬁlters so that we took out the transparency of all of these old buildings [in Butte, Montana] so I got as close as I possibly could to those cityscapes that I so admired. It’s like a big open-air studio and Hopper could have painted all his stuff there.” Don’t Come Knocking was one of four ﬁlms shown at “Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art,” a 2008 exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna, Austria. A 1996 essay on Hopper by Wenders was included in the exhibition catalog. “For a long time,” Wenders wrote, “a thick and heavy American art book was my standard work on Edward Hopper. His most important images were reproduced in it. The book suffered under various moves, but most of all under the shooting of the ﬁlm The American Friend in 1976, when my cameraman Robert Müller and I were so enthusiastic about Hopper ... that we always had his pictures with us, using them as models for many of the ﬁlm’s shots.” Sources: (1) Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (2) Gerald Matt, Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art.

Western Motel 1957. Oil on canvas, 305 ⁄ 8 ¥ 501 ⁄2 in. (77.8 ¥ 128.3 cm), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut — In 1956 Hopper received a Huntington Hartford Foundation Award for distinguished achievement in the arts, providing a $1,000 stipend and six months’ residency in Paciﬁc Palisades, California. He and Jo Hopper stayed in lodgings that had been designed by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank

Western Lloyd Wright. Early on, Hopper made a drawing titled Sketch of Hotel, a setting almost identical to Western Motel in its composition, but with two picture windows and with two ﬁgures sitting in what seems to be a lobby. In Western Motel, the large window in the earlier sketch becomes a wall, and the lobby a large bedroom. A woman is seated on the edge of a double bed, looking directly at the viewer (the one ﬁgure in all of Hopper’s paintings to do so). There is a Hopperesque quality to the painting. To curator Judith Barter, “The room seems hermetically silent and artiﬁcial — from the plate glass windows to the same orange curtains found in Hotel Window.... The ﬁgure sits stifﬂy on the bed, surrounded by luggage and sleek mountain forms, which are echoed by the streamlined hood of the car ... we do not know if she is arriving or departing.” Barter feels that the strangest element is that Hopper has the woman making eye contact with the viewer: “No imaginary wall or window separates us from her.... It is unnerving, for the eye contact negates the very essence of so many of Hopper’s works in which we watch unselfconscious subjects unaware of our presence ... we feel present in the room instead of standing apart from it and observing.” Western Motel was the subject of a 2008 exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien called “Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art,” which showcased artists from America and Europe whose works are inspired by Hopper. Gerald Matt, director of the Kunsthalle Wien, notes that since its completion in 1957, “Western Motel has been regarded as a symbol of U.S. society between mobility and anonymity, belief in progress and melancholy of loneliness — just as Hopper’s entire oeuvre is generally understood and disseminated as an ‘iconography’ of modern everyday life. His subjects are those things and places in the city or in the country that you hardly take notice of despite their typical character: stores, ofﬁces, houses, café and movie theater interiors, lighthouses, track systems, railway compartments, gas stations, hotel rooms.... By reducing these to their essential outward features

White and relying on light and shadow for his miseen-scène, the artist elevates them from their insigniﬁcance to small monuments and epiphanies of everyday life.” Sources: (1) Judith A. Barter, “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures” (2) Gerald Matt, Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art.

White River at Sharon 1937. Watercolor on paper, 213 ⁄4 ¥ 293 ⁄ 4 in. (55.3 ¥ 75.6 cm) National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.—While on a visit with Jo Hopper to their friend’s farm in Vermont, Hopper painted this scene of the White River, making use of the distinctive light of early autumn. He depicts the river’s rippling waters in the painting’s lower half and, above, the riverbank foliage. “Although the scene is probably more bucolic than rugged,” art critic William Zimmer observed in 2004, “Hopper gives it an untamed look.” But not quite — a closer look reveals a road barely visible in the center of the composition and, in the upper right, behind a dying tree, is a railroad embankment, shown as a swath of dark green. The scene Hopper painted can still be visited. Below Bethel, Vermont, the White River runs parallel with Interstate 89 and Vermont Route 14 and continues downstream through South Royalton and Sharon, where it broadens to twice its size. Trout and smallmouth bass abound. It’s the kind of place one associates more with Winslow Homer than with Hopper. Source: William Zimmer, “Treasures from a Treasured Attic.”

Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875–1942) Born into wealth, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney visited Europe in the early 1900s and, discovering the Paris, France, art scene, decided to become a sculptor. She studied her craft at the Art Students League of New York City and then with Auguste Rodin in Paris, maintaining an art studio in Greenwich Village. Her direct involvement with contemporary American art began in 1907 when she opened her studio as an exhibition space for

142 young artists. Later, at “The Eight” exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in Manhattan, she bought four of the seven paintings sold. Lloyd Goodrich once spoke to an interviewer about “Mrs. Whitney’s interest in American art and particularly the younger generation ... in 1914 she had started the Whitney Studio which showed at ﬁrst rather conservative artists, then more advanced ... without the hampering inﬂuence of conservative juries. There was always a feeling of close relationship between Mrs. Whitney and the creative artists. There was constant assistance to the artist by purchasing his work. The Whitney Studio Club was founded in 1918. Juliana Force was its active head. They felt there should be some place where young Americans could have a chance to show ... they were not all young men; there were older independents who had never had any recognition.” One of the “older independents” was Edward Hopper, who was given a one-man show at the Whitney Studio Club in 1920. By the end of the 1920s, Mrs. Whitney had amassed 700 works of contemporary art. When the Museum of Modern Art rejected her collection in 1929, she founded the Whitney Museum of American Art at 8–14 West Eighth Street in 1931, donating all of her collected art. When Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney died in 1942, her daughter, Flora Miller Biddle, took over the leadership of the Whitney Museum. The museum moved to a new building at 22 West 54th Street, and in 1966 to its present home at 945 Madison Avenue. The museum now has the world’s largest and ﬁnest collection of twentieth-century American art. Sources: (1) Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2) Lloyd Goodrich and Garnett McCoy, “Lloyd Goodrich Reminisces, Part I” (3) Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made.

Whitney Museum of American Art No art institution is more closely linked to Edward Hopper and his art than the Whitney,

143 now located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City. Shortly after the museum opened in 1931, its director Juliana Force purchased Hopper’s painting Early Sunday Morning (1930) for $3,000. It was the museum’s most expensive purchase up to that time, and marked the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship between Hopper and the Whitney. Between 1937 and 1959, Hopper’s paintings were included in eight Whitney annual exhibitions. The museum’s third director, Lloyd Goodrich, Hopper’s friend and champion, mounted two huge Hopper retrospectives, in 1950 and in 1964. The long and close relationship between the artist and the Whitney prompted Hopper’s widow, Jo Hopper, to bequeath his entire artistic estate to the museum, more than 2,500 works of art dating from Hopper’s student days to his later years. In addition, Jo Hopper recognized the unswerving support of Lloyd Goodrich by passing on to him each ledger book documenting almost all of Hopper’s artwork (Goodrich subsequently donated these to the Whitney). Since the deaths of Edward and Jo Hopper, the Whitney has presented four solo Hopper exhibitions. In 1979 Gail Levin curated and wrote catalogs for “Edward Hopper: Prints and Illustrations,” an exhibition of 173 trade journal illustrations and 78 early prints and preparatory drawings for them. In 1980 Levin repeated the process for “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist” (170 oils, 35 watercolors and 175 drawings). In 1980 the Whitney staged a third Hopper retrospective, and in 1995 it put on an exhibition of 58 of Hopper’s most popular works, titled “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination.” The 1995 exhibit prompted the art critic for the New York Times, Roberta Smith, to comment: “In many ways, Hopper is the Whitney’s Picasso: an artistic giant bound up in its history and growth.” In 2010 the Whitney owned 3,116 Hopper works of art, the largest Hopper collection anywhere in the world. Sources: (1) Adam D. Weinberg, American Art of the Twentieth Century: Treasures of the Whitney Mu-

Whitney seum of American Art (2) Roberta Smith, “Hopper Enlarged: The Father of Giants.”

Whitney Studio Club In 1918 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney took over the lease of a four-story brownstone at 147 West 4th Street, off Washington Square, a few blocks south of her New York City studio at 8 West 8th Street. After renovations, it began functioning as the Whitney Studio Club, a place for artists to exhibit, hold meetings, play billiards, exercise on a squash court, and make use of the club’s library. Both men and women could join, and membership fees were small. In naming Juliana Force to be the club’s director, Mrs. Whitney chose well. Avis Berman, Force’s biographer, asserts, “Juliana’s inﬂuence on American art in the 1920s cannot be overestimated. The Museum of Modern Art had not been born, the Metropolitan and the Academy were in the hands of stuffy autocrats, and the government and corporations were not involved with art patronage. For the young and uncredentialed, the Whitney was their only hope.” One of the Whitney Studio Club members was Guy Pène du Bois, and he persuaded Force to offer Hopper membership and a oneman exhibition. Hopper was then thirty-seven years old, still largely unknown and without a dealer. Avis Berman describes the 1920 exhibition: “Sixteen oils were shown — the painter’s scenes of Paris, Massachusetts, and Maine. Hopper’s famous raking light and his unadorned treatment of his subjects were already evident. That distinctive sensibility did not appeal to potential picture–buyers, and none of the paintings sold. But a strong connection was made between Hopper and the Whitney Studio Club.” The club offered instruction in ﬁgure drawing, and in the early and middle 1920s Hopper made the short stroll across Washington Square Park to attend classes, where he did many strong drawings of the model. Lloyd Goodrich feels that these drawings “are among his ﬁnest graphic works. Almost all were of women.... These drawings revealed not only

Woman a thorough knowledge of bodily structure, but a gift for capturing momentary poses and gestures.” Sources: (1) Avis Berman, “The Force Behind the Whitney” (2) Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (3) Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper.

A Woman in the Sun 1961. Oil on canvas, 40 ¥ 60 in. (101.6 ¥ 152.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York — Poet and critic John Taggart looks at A Woman in the Sun and sees a labyrinth of “walls, visible and implied windows, other pictures within the picture, a ﬂoor, and an elongated rectangle of cool, whitened yellow light on the ﬂoor and on which the ﬁgure of a woman stands.” Taggart understood that Hopper gave far more thought to his composition than to the circumstances of his ﬁgures. And yet, Hopper’s ﬁgures repeatedly tempt us into narrative. In this painting, he shows a woman standing beside an unmade bed, nude, taking in the sun. Her face is a mask; holding an unlit cigarette, she seems frozen in thought. Jo Hopper was in her late 70s when she posed for this ﬁgure. Taggart suggests that, by placing the woman in the sun, Hopper presented a metaphor of transformational change. “It is the power of the light,” Taggart asserts, “which creates the structure and the soul/self within it.” Hopper never explained his paintings; there is no way to know if he intended to show a woman at the threshold of spiritual growth. Source: John Taggart, Remaining in Light: Ant Meditations on a Painting by Edward Hopper.

Yawl Riding a Swell 1935. Watercolor on paper, 197 ⁄8 ¥ 273 ⁄ 4 in. (50.2 ¥ 70.5 cm), Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts—This is one of two watercolors that Hopper painted in the summer of 1935. It shows a gaff-rigged yawl, beamreach on a rolling swell. Art historian Theodore Stebbins asserts that the painting represents Hopper “at his technical and expressive height. He makes some concessions here to the wa-

144 tercolor medium, wiping washes over each other more gently than usual, allowing the texture and whiteness of the paper to show, and then clotting the strange blue sea with tiny dark strokes. But as usual, his power is the image—here a tiny yawl ... [in a] relatively ﬂat sea is pitched high out of the water. As in some of Hopper’s seascapes, the boat is fully rigged and one makes out no sense of concern on the part of the crew, yet there is an enigmatic air of unease, of imbalance, in the scene.” Hopper painted Yawl Riding a Swell during his ﬁrst summer with Jo at their newly built house in South Truro, Cape Cod. Hopper never owned a boat during his three dozen years on the Cape, but on occasion he sailed with friends. At those times, Jo felt anxious for her husband, and looking at Yawl Riding a Swell, we can see why: Only experienced sailors can manage a boat tipped so precariously. Late in 1935 Yawl Riding a Swell was exhibited at the Worcester Art Museum’s second biennial of contemporary American painting, where it won a $750 purchase prize. Source: Theodore Stebbins, American Master Drawings and Watercolors.

Zigrosser, Carl (1891 –1975) A warm relationship, begun in 1917, existed between Zigrosser and Hopper. Zigrosser had worked for Frederick Keppel, an art dealer in New York City to whom Hopper was then submitting his etchings. Zigrosser went on to found and direct (1919–40) the Weyhe Gallery, one of the ﬁrst in New York to specialize in prints. He was delighted at Hopper’s success. “The outstanding quality of Edward Hopper’s work in this ﬁeld,” Zigrosser wrote in 1929, “is a stark, uncompromising, almost heavy sincerity. He portrays with such unﬂinching afﬁrmation, the dreary stretches of American farm land, the ostentatiously ugly architecture of the ‘nineties,’ the weary absorption of the seamstress at work, the bourgeois grandeur of the suburban home.... His work is plain spoken, almost deliberately so, with never a redeeming ﬂower or grace.” In 1940 Zigrosser became curator of prints

145 and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1962, he organized a retrospective of Hopper’s prints, “The Complete Graphic Work of Edward Hopper.” That same year, Zigrosser shared these thoughts: “Hopper’s attitude toward his prints is curiously ambivalent. They are his own creations, of course, and, as with children, there are some he likes and some he tolerates. But he often says — facetiously perhaps — that he could have put the time he spent in printmaking to better use. He seems to believe that nobody cares for his prints; I believe that he is very much mis-

Zigrosser taken.... Whether he admits it or not, it is obvious that he has ‘graphic sense’: that rare combination of masterly draftsmanship and the ability to charge inked lines with emotion. The etchings of this old Independent have won the respect of critics and artists not only of conservative but also of advanced tastes. He has become a distinguished American printmaker in spite of himself.” Sources: (1) Carl Zigrosser, “Modern American Etching” (2) Carl Zigrosser, “The Etchings of Edward Hopper.”

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APPENDIX A. LIFE CHRONOLOGY 1882 1890

July September

1898

February

1899

June September

1900

January

1904

September

1905

May

1906

March October

1907

June July August September

1908

March

1909

March

1910

July August April

Born in Nyack, New York, on July 22 Enters public school on Liberty Street, Nyack; his 1890 report card shows a grade of 100 percent in geography, spelling, reading, punctuality and behavior. Makes pen and ink drawing of the destruction of the Maine and of a SpanishAmerican War event titled Shelling Havana. Graduates from Nyack High School after receiving honors from the New York State Regents Examinations in drawing and plane geometry. Enrolls in the New York School of Illustrating at 114 West 34th Street, New York City; takes lessons for several months. Begins six years of study at the New York School of Art, located at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue. Begins teaching Saturday classes in life drawing, painting, sketching, and composition at the New York School of Art; rents small studio space (he remembered it as barely habitable, “terrible”) on Fourteenth Street. Hired as illustrator for ad agency C.C. Phillips & Co., 24 East 22nd Street, New York. (From 1905 to 1923, his main source of income will come from his work as an illustrator — a job he hates.) Beginning in mid-month, takes four weeks of life and portrait classes under John Sloan, who is substituting for Robert Henri. Departs for a 16-month stay in Europe, beginning in Paris, where he stays for seven months at 48 rue de Lille, one block from the Seine. Departs Paris for three weeks in London, where he visits the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and Westminster Abbey. Departs London for one week in Amsterdam, where Henri is conducting a summer school; travels on to Berlin for ﬁve days. Departs Berlin for Brussels, stays two days before returning to Paris for three weeks; sails home to New York. Finds work as an illustrator for an advertising agency in New York City, where he works three days a week. Exhibits three Paris oils, The Louvre and Seine, The Bridge of the Arts, and The Park at St. Cloud at the Harmonie Club in New York City. Nothing sells. Makes a second trip to Paris, where he paints eleven oils during an 18-week stay. Departs Paris. Arrives in New York. Joins Henri, Sloan, Bellows, du Bois, Kent and others in “Exhibition of Inde-

147

Appendix A

May June July 1912

July

1913

January February December

1914

January March July October November

1915

February October November

1917

February April

1918

March April August

1919

February April May

1920

January March December

1921

March May

148 pendent Artists” at 29-31 35th Street, New York; shows one oil, The Louvre. Returns to Paris, stays a week or so before leaving on May 26 for a stay of eleven days in Madrid, where he attends a bull ﬁght. Visits Toledo, Spain, before returning to Paris for three weeks. Returns to New York City. Hopper never again travels outside North America. Comes to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for the summer; paints out-of-doors in America for the ﬁrst time. Exhibits La Berge and Squam Light in a group show at the MacDowell Club, New York City. Nothing sells. Exhibits in the Armory Show; sells an oil painting, Sailing, to Thomas F. Viator for $250. This is Hopper’s ﬁrst sale of ﬁne art. Moves to top ﬂoor of 3 Washington Square North, an 1830s row house, where he lives and works for the rest of his life. Shows The Bridge and Gloucester Harbor in a group show at the MacDowell Club. Nothing sells. Hired by the U.S. Printing & Litho Co. to design a series of posters for a French movie company. Travels to Ogunquit, Maine, for the summer, completes six oils. Bumps into Josephine Nivison, who is staying at the same hotel. His Road in Maine is praised by Guy Pène du Bois in an Arts and Decoration article. Exhibits for ﬁrst time in a commercial gallery in “Open Exhibition, Season 1914-15,” Montross Gallery, New York; Road in Maine does not sell. Exhibits Soir Bleu and New York Corner in a group show at the MacDowell Club. Nothing sells. Offers Saturday morning art classes at mother’s home in Nyack. One student is the sister of artist Joseph Cornell, then living in Nyack. Exhibits American Village, Rocks and Houses, and The Dories, Ogunquit, in a group show at the MacDowell Club. Nothing sells. Exhibits Portrait of Mrs. Sullivan and Rocks and Sand in a group show at MacDowell Club. Nothing sells. Exhibits American Village and Sea at Ogunquit at the American Society of Independent Artists in New York. Nothing sells. Exhibits Somewhere in France at Art Institute of Chicago’s “Exhibition of Etchings.” Guy Pène du Bois praises Hopper’s etchings in newspaper review. His poster Smash the Hun wins $300 ﬁrst prize in a nationwide competition to promote public support during World War I. His Smash the Hun image is used as the cover of the monthly trade journal The Morse Dial. Places Open Window, The Bull Fight, The Monhegan Boat in “Exhibition of Etchings and Block Prints” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibits in “Black and White Exhibition: Drawing, Etchings, Lithographs” at the Wanamaker Gallery, New York City. Receives his ﬁrst one-man show, at Whitney Studio Club, New York (shows 16 oils painted in Paris and in Monhegan, Maine). Nothing sells. Exhibits in “Exhibition of Works by the Members” at Whitney Studio Club. Exhibits Les Poilus and The Bull Fight at the “Fifth Annual Exhibition, Brooklyn Society of Etchers.” Exhibits in the “96th Annual Exhibition” at the National Academy of Design in New York. Is included in Annual Exhibition of Whitney Studio Club and in succeeding exhibitions over the next four years.

149 1922

February March October December

1923

February March November December

1924

February March May July October

1925

January February May June July October

1926

December January February April

1927

November January February March

Life Chronology

Exhibits in “American Etchers Salon of 1922” at the Brown-Robertson Galleries, New York. Exhibits an oil, New York Interior, and three etchings at the Whitney Studio Club. Exhibits in “Exhibitions of Paintings and Sculpture by Members of the Club” at the Whitney Studio Club. Nothing sells. Receives a one-man show at the Whitney Studio Club where he shows 10 Paris caricatures and a group of prints. New York Restaurant is included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art biennial exhibition. Enters “Exhibition of Etchers” at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he wins the Logan Prize of $25 for East Side Interior. East Side Interior wins the prize for Best American Print in the “Fourth International Print Makers Exhibition” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Exhibits in “A Group Exhibition of Water Color Paintings, Pastels, Drawings and Sculpture by American and European Artists” at the Brooklyn Museum. Sells The Mansard Roof to the Brooklyn Museum for $100. Exhibits several watercolors in “Exhibition of Contemporary American Watercolors” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Enters New York Interior, an oil, in the “119th Annual Exhibition” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Exhibits in the “Fourth International Water Color Exhibition” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibits in the “Annual Members Exhibition” at the Whitney Studio Club. Marries Josephine Nivison at the Eglise Evangelique on West 16th Street; Guy Pène du Bois is best man. Receives one-man show, “Recent Watercolors by Edward Hopper” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York. His entire exhibition is sold, permitting Hopper to give up his job as illustrator. Paints Day after the Funeral, a watercolor, to commemorate the death of his friend and fellow painter George Bellows. Exhibits in the “120th Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.” The academy buys Apartment Houses for $400, Hopper’s ﬁrst sale of an oil to a museum. Exhibits at the “10th Annual Exhibition of the Members” at the Whitney Studio Club. Travels to James Mountain, Colorado, and continues on to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Along with his wife, Jo, takes a twenty-ﬁve-mile ride on horseback in the mountains near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Delivers Adobe Houses; Interior; D. & R.G. Locomotive; La Penitente; Poplars; Ranch House, Santa Fe; St. Francis Towers, and Skyline Near Washington Square to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Enjoys performance of Ibsen’s 1892 play The Master Builder. Exhibits in “The New Society of Artists Exhibition” at the Anderson Galleries, New York. Exhibits in “Today in American Art” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Receives a one-man show, “Exhibition of Water Colors and Etchings by Edward Hopper,” at St. Botolph Club, Boston. His oil Sunday is purchased by art collector Duncan Phillips for $600. Sees Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 ﬁlm Battleship Potemkin. Receives one-man show, “Recent Works by Edward Hopper,” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Receives high praise in an article in The Arts from the magazine’s editor, Lloyd Goodrich.

Appendix A

1928

April January March May July November

1929

January February April December

1930

January March May June July October

1931

January May June November

1932

January March November

1933

December May June October

150 His article “John Sloan and the Philadelphians” is published in The Arts. Produces his last two prints, an etching, The Balcony and a drypoint, Portrait of Jo. Receives one-man show, “Watercolors and Etchings by Edward Hopper,” at the Utica Art Society, Utica, New York. Exhibits in “Group Exhibition of American Paintings” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. His article “Charles Burchﬁeld: American” appears in The Arts. Receives one-man show, “Exhibition of the Water Colors of Edward Hopper,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. Exhibits in the “27th Annual International Exhibition of Paintings” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Receives a one-man show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery (12 oils, 10 watercolors, and a group of drawings). Exhibits in “An Exhibition of American Art” at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Drives to Charleston, South Carolina, where he paints eleven watercolors during his three-week stay. Exhibits in “Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans,” at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art, New York. House by the Railroad is donated by Steven C. Clark to the Museum of Modern Art. Completes Early Sunday Morning in his New York studio and delivers the oil to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Exhibits in “XVII Venice Biennale,” Venice, Italy; Early Sunday Morning is purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art for $3,000. Visits for a week with Edward and Grace Root at Clinton, New York. Makes ﬁrst visit to Cape Cod, where he and Jo rent a South Truro cottage from A.B. Burleigh Cobb, the local postmaster. Exhibits South Truro Church in “Opening Exhibition” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Wins honorable mention and $100 prize for Night Windows at the “First Baltimore Pan American Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings” at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Tables for Ladies is purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $4,500. Exhibits in “Eleventh Exhibition of Contemporary American Oils” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Exhibits Life Boat and Rocky Pedestal at the “Thirtieth Annual Water Color Exhibition,” Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Places Chop Suey and Room in Brooklyn in the “Exhibition of Modern American Paintings,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Turns down election into National Academy of Design because the academy had rejected his work in earlier years. Exhibits in the “First Biennial Exhibition American Painting” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He will be represented in almost every Whitney Biennial thereafter. Exhibits Barber Shop in the Corcoran Gallery biennial in Washington, D.C. Exhibits in “A Century of Progress” at the Art Institute of Chicago and in “Water Colors by Twelve Americans” at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts. Travels by car with Jo from New Hampshire to Quebec City for a stay of two days. Purchases property on Cape Cod in South Truro, Massachusetts, and begins plans to build a summer home and studio.

151 November 1934

January May July November December

1935

January May November

1936

March November December

1937

March

June September December 1938

May October December

1939

February March April May June December

1940

July

Life Chronology

His ﬁrst retrospective (oils, watercolors, prints) opens at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). MoMA Retrospective Exhibition moves on from New York to the Arts Club of Chicago. Exhibits in the “XIX Venice Biennale,” American Pavilion, Venice, Italy; exhibits in “Five Americans,” Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Moves into completed house in South Truro. He and Jo will return for another 31 summers. Exhibits in “Modern Works of Art — Fifth Anniversary Exhibition,” an international loan show at the Museum of Modern Art. Exhibits in “Watercolors: Sheeler, Hopper, Burchﬁeld” at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wins Temple Gold Medal for Mrs. Scott’s House in “The 130th Annual Exhibition” at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Exhibits in “33 Artists” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Wins $750 First Purchase Prize in Watercolor for Yawl Riding a Swell in a group exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. Exhibits in “1936” at Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Third Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting,” The Circle Theatre is purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art, following its exhibition in the museum’s third biennial. Receives a solo show, “An Exhibition of Paintings, Water Colors and Etchings by Edward Hopper,” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Exhibits in “Fifteenth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Oil Paintings,” Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where he is awarded ﬁrst W.A. Clark Prize for Cape Cod Afternoon. Exhibits in “American Painting from 1860 until Today,” at the Cleveland Museum of Art; Coast Guard Station (the 1929 oil) is purchased by the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey. Visits South Royalton in the White River Valley of Vermont. Exhibits in “The 1937 International Exhibition of Paintings” at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which acquires his Cape Cod Afternoon. Exhibits in “Trois siècles d’art aux Etats-Unis,” Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris. Exhibits in “Forty-ninth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Acquires small, unheated studio for Jo Hopper at the rear of where they live at 3 Washington Square North. Delivers his oil New York Movie to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Twenty-six of his watercolors are showcased at the Art Institute of Chicago’s “18th International Exhibition of Watercolors, Pastels, Drawings, and Monotypes.” Exhibits in “Ten American Watercolor Painters” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Exhibits in “American Art Today,” at the New York World’s Fair, Flushing, New York. Exhibits in the “Twentieth Annual Exhibition” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Completes oil, The MacArthurs’ Home, Pretty Penny, a house portrait commissioned by the playwright Charles MacArthur and his wife, the actress Helen Hayes. Night Windows is one of thirteen of newly acquired artworks placed on exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art.

Appendix A September 1941

January

1942

April October

1943

January March June July November

1944 1945

December May June August January February March May October

1946

April May June July

1947

April November

1948

January

1949

1950

February July October April June October December February April June

152 Five A.M. is presented to the Wichita Art Museum, along with 15 paintings by other artists, a gift that is the nucleus of what will become the institution’s American collection. Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery opens one-man Hopper show of his early (1906– 14) artworks. Serves as honorary pallbearer at the funeral of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Wins $750 prize for Nighthawks at the “Fifty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Delivers his latest oil, Hotel Lobby, to the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Serves on selection jury for the Corcoran Biennial, Washington, D.C. Travels with Jo by train to Mexico City; visits Saltillo and Monterey. Museum of Modern Art places its newly purchased Hopper oil, Gas, on exhibit. Receives one-man show, “Water Colors by Edward Hopper,” at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. His painting, Gas, is purchased by the Museum of Modern Art. Exhibits at the “Group Exhibition” at Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Motors with Jo to South Truro for the summer. Begins work in his Truro studio on The Martha McKeen of Wellﬂeet. Along with Jo, watches World War II victory parade on 5th Avenue. Places nine works from 1926–43 in “American Watercolor and Winslow Homer’s Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Attends dinner to honor Frank Rehn and poses with 13 other artists and Rehn for a group photograph. Wins $1,000 prize for Ofﬁce at Night at the “Seventy-ﬁfth Anniversary Exhibition” at the Salmagundi Club, New York. Wins the Logan Art Institute medal and $500 for Hotel Lobby in the “FiftySixth Annual American Exhibition of Paintings” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibits in “Robert Henri and Five of His Pupils” at Century Association, New York. Drives with Jo to Saltillo, Mexico. Exhibits in “American Painting: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day” at the Tate Gallery, London. Joins with other Washington Square North artists and residents to protest and resist New York University’s eviction notice. Completes Pennsylvania Coal Town. Travels to Indianapolis to serve on a selection jury for an exhibition of Indiana artists. Featured in articles in Time magazine and the New Yorker; receives a “Paintings by Edward Hopper” show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery. Undergoes surgery to correct a prostate problem. Motors with Jo to Cape Cod for the summer. Exhibits in “An American Show” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Undergoes surgery to repair his urethral wall. Motors with Jo to Cape Cod for the summer. Exhibits in “Amerikanische Meister des Aquarells,” Vienna, Austria. Asks Jo to pose as both woman and man in Summer in the City. Receives retrospective exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art, organized by Lloyd Goodrich. Attends the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, opening of the Whitney Museum touring Hopper retrospective exhibition. Attends the Detroit Institute of Arts opening of the Whitney Museum touring Hopper retrospective exhibition.

153 December 1951

February May

1952

June

1953

December April May June July September October

1954

January October

1955

February March May

1956

March May June July

1957

December January March April July October December

1958

January December

1959

March July August October

1960

January

Life Chronology

Receives one-man show, “Prints by Edward Hopper,” at the MunsonWilliams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York. Chairs selection jury for Corcoran Biennial, Washington, D.C. Leaves with Jo by car for Saltillo, Mexico, via Chattanooga, Tennessee; they will visit Santa Fe, New Mexico, on return trip. Selected as one of four Americans to exhibit in the Venice Biennale; shows 15 oils and 5 watercolors Drives with Jo to Mexico via El Paso, Texas; visits Mitla, Oaxaca, and Puebla. Publishes a statement on “Great Art” in Reality: A Journal of Artists’ Opinions. Attends funeral of Everett Shinn, the last surviving member of “The Eight.” Receives an honorary doctor of letters degree from Rutgers University. Motors with Jo to South Truro for the summer. Motors to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to visit Frank Rehn, who is hospitalized after suffering a stroke. His House by a Railroad (and Jo Hopper’s Convent across the Square through Fire Escape) are exhibited at the Whitney Museum. Enters New York Hospital for hernia operation. Exhibits in “American Watercolor Exhibition” at the India Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New Delhi. Exhibits in “Five Painters of America” at Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts. Departs with Jo on a motor trip to Mexico, where he hopes to do some paintings. Is too ill to paint in Mexico; returns to New York; wins Gold Medal for Painting from American Academy of Arts and Letters. Attends the funeral of Frank K.M. Rehn, his only art dealer for four decades. Is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, along with Andrew Wyeth and Marianne Moore. Exhibits at the American Pavilion, “XXVIII Venice Biennale,” Venice, Italy. Receives the 1956-57 Huntington Hartford Foundation award: $1,000 and six-month residency in California. Is the subject of Time magazine’s December 24 cover story. Takes up a half-year residency, along with Jo, on the Huntington Hartford Foundation grounds in Paciﬁc Palisades, California. Completes an oil, Western Motel, developed from sketches he makes of his Paciﬁc Palisades lodging. Begins a watercolor, California Hills; he will ﬁnish it later this year in Cape Cod. Drives with Jo to South Truro, Massachusetts, for the summer. Receives silver medallion from the New York Board of Trade for artistic attainment. Other recipients include Agnes de Mille, Brooks Atkinson, and Rudolf Bing. Undergoes prostate surgery at New York Hospital; Brooklyn Museum puts newly purchased Macomb’s Dam Bridge on exhibition. Undergoes follow-up prostate surgery at New York Hospital. Attends the funeral of Guy Pène du Bois and tells du Bois’s daughter: “He certainly was the best friend I had in art.” Agrees to accompany Jo to Easter Sunday services at the Church of the Ascension on 5th Avenue and 10th Street. The Lighthouse at Two Lights is part of a collection of American artworks sent to the Soviet Union and placed on exhibition in Moscow. Completes Excursion into Philosophy at his South Truro studio. Motors up to New Hampshire to be on hand for a retrospective exhibition of his watercolors at the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire. Receives one-man show at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

Appendix A April August December 1961

January March April October

1962 1963

April July April May

1964

February May September

1965

January June July August

1966

November August December

1967

May

154 With Raphael Soyer and Henry Varnham Poor and 19 other artists, signs a letter to the Whitney Museum of American Art protesting the museum’s showing of abstract art at the expense of realist art. Photographed by Arnold Newman as he sits down the hillside from his South Truro summer home. Wins medal and $1,000, the Art in America Annual Award, for outstanding contribution to American art. Turns down invitation to attend the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The New York Times prints his letter defending John Canaday, its chief art critic. Travels with Jo to Boston to appear in an educational television series hosted by Brian O’Doherty. Philadelphia Museum of Art stages “The Complete Graphic Work of Edward Hopper,” showing 52 of his prints. Begins work on New York Ofﬁce. Drives up to South Truro for the summer. Receives “A Retrospective Exhibition of Oils and Watercolors by Edward Hopper” at the University of Arizona Art Gallery. Presented with award of $1,000 by the St. Botolph’s Club, Boston, for his works of “serene light and quiet understanding.” His Road and Trees wins the prize for painting at the “67th Annual American Exhibition,” Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibits in “Four Centuries of American Masterpieces” at the New York World’s Fair. “Edward Hopper” opens at Whitney Museum of American Art. The retrospective exhibition will travel on to the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Declines an invitation to attend Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration. Is awarded an honorary doctor of ﬁne arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art. Attends funeral of his sister, Marion Hopper, who dies in Nyack, New York, on July 16. Along with Jo, is driven to South Truro for the summer by his Washington Square North handyman, Eddie Brady. Completes his ﬁnal painting, Two Comedians. Receives the MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to the arts, but is too ill to attend the presentation. Is taken by ambulance to St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York; undergoes a double hernia operation. Dies on May 15 in his New York studio. Josephine Nivison Hopper will die ten months later, on March 6, 1968. They are buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York.

APPENDIX B. SOLO AND RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITIONS, 1920–2010 1920 1924 1927 1929 1933 1934 1937 1941 1943 1948 1950 1959

1962 1963 1964 1971

“Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Etchings,” Whitney Studio Club, New York, January 14–January 27. “Watercolors by Edward Hopper,” Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York, October–November 1. “Recent Works of Edward Hopper,” Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York, February 14– March 5. “Exhibition by Edward Hopper,” Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery, New York, January 21–February 2. “Edward Hopper: Retrospective Exhibition,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 1–December 7. “Paintings by Edward Hopper,” The Arts Club of Chicago, January 2–January 16. “An Exhibition of Paintings, Watercolors, and Etchings by Edward Hopper,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, March 11–April 25. “Early Paintings by Edward Hopper,” Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery, New York, January 6– February 1. “Water Colors by Edward Hopper,” Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery, New York, November 29– December 23. “Paintings by Edward Hopper,” Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery, New York, January 5–January 31. “Edward Hopper: Retrospective,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 11–March 26; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 13–May 14; Detroit Institute of Arts, June 4–July 2. “Watercolors by Edward Hopper: With a Selection of His Etchings,” Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, October 8–November 15; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, December 2–December 27; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, January 6–February 7, 1960. “The Complete Graphic Work of Edward Hopper: In Fifty-two Subjects and One Hundred and Fifteen Variant and Final States,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, October–November, 1962; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, April 25–July 1, 1963. “A Retrospective Exhibition of Oils and Watercolors by Edward Hopper,” Art Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson, April 20–May 19. “Edward Hopper,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24–November 29; Art Institute of Chicago, December 18–January 31, 1965; Detroit Institute of Arts, February 18–March 21; City Art Museum of St. Louis, April 7–May 9, 1965. “Edward Hopper: Oils, Watercolors, Etchings,” William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, July 9–September 5; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, September 24–October 31.

155

Appendix B 1971 1972 1974 1975 1977 1979

1979 1980

1980

1980 1982

1982 1986 1987 1988 1989

1989 1989

156

“Edward Hopper: Selections from the Hopper Bequest to the Whitney Museum of American Art,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 10–October 25. “Edward Hopper,” Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, January 25–February 27. “Edward Hopper: Paintings, Prints, Drawings,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, New York, July 11–August 15. “Edward Hopper: Retrospective,” Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, October 19– November 16. “Edward Hopper,” Kennedy Galleries, New York, May 11–June 8. “Edward Hopper: Prints and Illustrations,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 17–December 9; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, February 5–March 16, 1980; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, March 30–May 11; Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, June 10–July 20; Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin, August 7–September 21; San Jose Museum of Art, California, October 16–November 30, 1980. “The Boyhood World of Edward Hopper,” Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, New York, May 20–June 24. “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 23–January 18, 1981; Hayward Gallery, London, February 11–March 29; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, April 22–June 17; Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, July 8–September 2; Art Institute of Chicago, October 3–November 29; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 16–February 10, 1982. “Edward Hopper: The Formative Years,” San Jose Museum of Art, California, October 16–November 30; Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Wales, January 10, 1981–February 14; The Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh, February 28–April 5; Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, West Germany, April 19–May 31; Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales, August 14–October 3; Padiglione D’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, October 18–November 19, 1981. “Edward Hopper: The Early Years,” Brevard Art Center, Melbourne, Florida, November 29–January 4, 1981; Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida, January 9– February 28; Polk Public Museum, Lakeland, Florida, March 4–April 12, 1981. “The World of Edward Hopper,” Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, March 5–April 4; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, April 20–May 23; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, June 11–July 11; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, July 30–August 29. “Edward Hopper: Development of an American Artist,” Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, November 5–January 9, 1983; Aspen Center for Visual Arts, Colorado, January 21– March 6; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, March 18–May 1, 1983. “Edward Hopper: City, Country, Town,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Fairﬁeld County, Connecticut, September 4–October 29. “Edward Hopper, Early and Late: Drawings, Watercolors, and Paintings,” Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, March 14–April 18. “Edward Hopper: Light Years,” Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, October 1–November 12. “Edward Hopper: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 21–November 5; Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, October 6–December 12, 1990; Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, January 20–March 17, 1991; Seattle Art Museum, Washington, April 25–July 14; Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, July 28–September 22; Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland, October 8–January 12, 1992; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark, January 25–April 26, 1992. “In Black and White: Selected American Drawings and Prints. Part II, Edward Hopper,” Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, California, August 18–September 18. “Edward Hopper,” Musée Cantini, Marseilles, France, June 23–September 24; Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain, October 6–January 6, 1990.

157 1989 1991 1992 1993 1993 1995 1995 1995 1999 2000 2000

2003 2003

2004 2004 2005 2005 2006 2007 2008 2008 2008 2009

Solo and Retrospective Exhibitions

“The Truth of the Real: Edward Hopper and Photography,” Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, June 28–September 27. “The Drawings of Edward Hopper,” Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, New York, November 8–December 13. “Edward Hopper,” Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, December 5–February 14, 1993; Paleis Voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels, February 26–May 23, 1993. “Edward Hopper Paintings,” Gagosian Gallery, New York, October 7–November 13. “Edward Hopper and the Figure,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Stamford, Connecticut, July 22–September 22. “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 21–October 15. “The Early Drawings of Edward Hopper,” Kennedy Galleries, New York, November 4– November 25. “The Poetry of Solitude: Edward Hopper’s Drawings,” Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee, September 9–October 15. “Edward Hopper: The Watercolors,” The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., October 22–January 3, 2000; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama, January 29–March 26, 2000. “Edward Hopper, Printmaker,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 26–July 16. “Edward Hopper,” Bukamura Museum of Art, Tokyo, July 15–August 27; Fukushima Prefectural Museum, Japan, September 2–October 15; Hiroshima Museum, Japan, October 21–November 26; Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, Japan, December 2–January 14, 2001. “A Matter of Time: Edward Hopper from the Whitney Museum of American Art,” High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, August 30–October 26. “Edward Hopper: The Paris Years, 1906–10,” Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, February 22–June 1; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, July 11–September 21; Tyler Museum of Art, Tyler, Texas, October 16–January 11, 2004; Musée d’Art Américain, Giverny, France, April 1–July 4, 2004. “Edward Hopper,” Tate Modern, London, England, May 27–September 5; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany, October 9–January 9, 2005. “Edward Hopper’s Rockland,” Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine, June 6–September 26. “Edward Hopper: The Capezzera Drawings,” Peter Findlay Gallery, New York, May 3– May 31. “At the Window: Etchings by Edward Hopper,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, April 9– July 31. “Edward Hopper in Charleston,” Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, May 26–August 13. “Edward Hopper,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, May 6–August 13; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., September 16–January 21, 2008; Art Institute of Chicago, February 16–May 11, 2008. “Edward Hopper Etchings,” Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, May 30–August 15. “Edward Hopper: Paper to Paint,” Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana, August 30–January 4, 2009. “Edward Hopper’s Women,” Seattle Art Museum, Oregon, November 13–March 1, 2009. “Edward Hopper,” Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, October 15–January 24, 2010; Fondazione Roma Museo, Rome, Italy, February 23–June 23; Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne, Switzerland, June 25–October 17, 2010.

APPENDIX C. CHRONOLOGY OF CITED ARTWORKS Date, title, medium, dimensions, and location in 2010 are provided. Works that have received an entry in the present volume are in boldface. c. 1893. The Race*. Graphite and watercolor on paper. 41 ⁄ 8 ¥ 5 in. (10.5 ¥ 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1895. Rowboat and Rocky Cove*. Oil on canvas. 10 ¥ 133 ⁄ 4 in. (25.4 ¥ 34.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1900. Garret Henry Hopper, The Artist’s Father*. Gouache and watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 101 ⁄ 4 in. (34.3 ¥ 26 cm). Private Collection. c. 1900. Sailboat*. Watercolor on paper. 53 ⁄ 8 ¥ 41 ⁄ 2 in. (13.7 ¥ 11.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1902–04. Solitary Figure in a Theater*. Oil on board. 121 ⁄ 2 ¥ 95 ⁄ 16 in. (31.8 ¥ 23.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1903–05. Nude Crawling into Bed*. Oil on board. 121 ⁄ 4 ¥ 91 ⁄ 8 in. (31.1 ¥ 23.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1904–06. Ferry Slip*. Oil on board. 121 ⁄ 2 ¥ 93 ⁄ 8 in. (31.8 ¥ 23.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1904–06. Rooftops of Ferry Slip*. Oil on board. 17 ¥ 121 ⁄ 2 in. (43.2 ¥ 31.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1905–06. Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack*. Oil on board. 151 ⁄ 16 ¥ 111 ⁄ 16 in. (38.3 ¥ 28.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1905–06. Man Seated on Bed*. Oil on canvas. 11 ¥ 87 ⁄ 8 in. (27.9 ¥ 22.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1905–06. Bedroom*. Oil on board. 53 ⁄ 16 ¥ 37 ⁄ 8 in. (13.2 ¥ 9.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. Street Scene with Pedestrians*. Oil on board. 151 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1115 ⁄ 16 in. (38.4 ¥ 30.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris*. Oil on wood. 13 ¥ 95 ⁄ 8 in. (33 ¥ 24.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. Bridge in Paris*. Oil on wood. 95 ⁄ 8 ¥ 13 in. (24.4 ¥ 33 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. View Across Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris*. Oil on wood. 13 ¥ 91 ⁄ 4 in. (33 ¥ 23.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris*. Oil on wood. 13 ¥ 91 ⁄ 4 in. (33 ¥ 23.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906. Paris Street*. Oil on wood. 13 ¥ 93 ⁄ 8 in. (33 ¥ 23.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

158

159

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1906–07. Parisian Workman*. Watercolor on board. 151 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1011 ⁄ 16 in. (38.4 ¥ 25.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906–07. Sargent de Ville. Watercolor on board. 1113 ⁄ 16 ¥ 91 ⁄ 2 in. (30 ¥ 24.1 cm). The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. 1906–07. La Concierge. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 93 ⁄ 8 in. (29.8 ¥ 23.8 cm). The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. 1906–07. La Grisette. Watercolor on paper. 143 ⁄ 4 ¥ 103 ⁄ 8 in. (37.5 ¥ 26.4 cm). The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. 1906–07. Parisian Woman Dressed in Green*. Watercolor on board. 15 ¥ 109 ⁄ 16 in. (38.1 ¥ 26.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906–07. Cunard Sailor*. Watercolor on board. 1413 ⁄ 16 ¥ 105 ⁄ 8 in. (37.6 ¥ 27 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906–07. Seated Carriage Driver*. Watercolor on board. 147 ⁄ 8 ¥ 107 ⁄ 8 in. (37.8 ¥ 27.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906–07. Couple Drinking*. Watercolor on board. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 20 in. (34.3 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1906–07. Dandy Seated at Café Table*. Watercolor on board. 1913 ⁄ 16 ¥ 143 ⁄ 4 in. (50.3 ¥ 37.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Le Louvre et la Seine. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.7 ¥ 73.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Après-midi de Juin. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.7 ¥ 73.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Le Parc de Saint-Cloud. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Trees in Sunlight, Parc de Saint-Cloud. Oil on canvas. 235 ⁄ 8 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (60 ¥ 73 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Le Pont des Arts. Oil on canvas. 237 ⁄ 16 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (59.5 ¥ 73 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Canal Lock at Charenton. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 4 ¥ 283 ⁄ 8 in. (59.1 ¥ 72.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1907. Pavillon de Flore in the Spring. Oil on canvas. 235 ⁄ 8 ¥ 285 ⁄ 8 in. (60 ¥ 72.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1908. The El Station. Oil on canvas. 20 ¥ 29 in. (50.8 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1908. Railroad Train. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. 1909. Le Pont Royal. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 4 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.1 ¥ 72.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. Le Pavillon de Flore. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 285 ⁄ 8 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. The Louvre in a Thunderstorm. Oil on canvas. 23 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (58.4 ¥ 73 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. Le Quai des Grands Augustins. Oil on canvas. 231 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.7 ¥ 72.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. Valley of the Seine. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. Le Bistro, or The Wine Shop. Oil on canvas. 233 ⁄ 8 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.4 ¥ 72.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1909. Summer Interior. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1910. Self-Portrait*. Watercolor on paper. 183 ⁄ 8 ¥ 121 ⁄ 4 in. (46.7 ¥ 31.1 cm). Private Collection. 1911. Blackwell’s Island. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1911. Sailing. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Appendix C

160

1912. Briar Neck. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1912. Gloucester Harbor. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1912. Tall Masts. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1912. Italian Quarter, Gloucester. Oil on canvas. 233 ⁄ 8 ¥ 281 ⁄ 2 in. (59.2 ¥ 72.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1912. Squam Light. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Private Collection. 1912. American Village. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1913. New York Corner, or Corner Saloon. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Private Collection. 1913. Queensborough Bridge. Oil on canvas. 251 ⁄ 2 ¥ 371 ⁄ 2 in. (64.8 ¥ 95.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Soir Bleu. Oil on canvas. 36 ¥ 72 in. (91.4 ¥ 182.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Sea at Ogunquit. Oil on canvas. 241 ⁄ 4 ¥ 291 ⁄ 8 in. (61.6 ¥ 74 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Cove at Ogunquit. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Dories in a Cove*. Oil on canvas. 93 ⁄ 8 ¥ 123 ⁄ 4 in. (23.8 ¥ 32.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. The Dories, Ogunquit. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit. Oil on canvas. 233 ⁄ 4 ¥ 283 ⁄ 4 in. (60.3 ¥ 73 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Square Rock, Ogunquit. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1914. Road in Maine. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1915–16. Elizabeth Grifﬁths Smith Hopper, the Artist’s Mother*. Oil on canvas. 38 ¥ 32 in. (96.5 ¥ 81.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. Paris Street Scene with Carriage*. Etching on copper. 4 ¥ 5 in. (10.16 ¥ 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. Street in Paris. Etching on zinc. 8 ¥ 91 ⁄ 2 in. (20.3 ¥ 24.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. Evening, the Seine. Etching on zinc. 4 ¥ 5 in. (10.2 ¥ 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. Les Poilus. Etching on copper. 6 ¥ 7 in. (15.2 ¥ 17.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. La Barrière. Drypoint on zinc. 7 ¥ 8 in. (17.8 ¥ 20.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1915–18. Café*. Etching on copper. 4 ¥ 5 in. (10.2 ¥ 12.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1916. Yonkers. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1916–19. Monhegan Lighthouse*. Oil on canvas. 91 ⁄ 2 ¥ 123 ⁄ 4 in. (24.1 ¥ 32.4 cm). Private Collection. 1916–19. Blackhead, Monhegan*. Oil on wood. 91 ⁄ 2 ¥ 13 in. (24.1 ¥ 33 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (70.1317). 1917. The Bull Fight. Etching on copper. 47 ⁄ 8 ¥ 7 in. (12.4 ¥ 17.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1918. Night on the El Train. Etching on copper. 71 ⁄ 2 ¥ 8 in. (19.1 ¥ 20.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

161

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1918. The Monhegan Boat. Etching on copper. 7 ¥ 9 in. (17.8 ¥ 22.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1918. Portrait of Walter Tittle. Etching on copper. 5 ¥ 4 in. (12.7 ¥ 10.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1918–20. Small Town Station*. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1919–23. People in the Park. Etching on copper. 7 ¥ 10 in. (17.78 ¥ 25.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1920. American Landscape. Etching on copper. 71 ⁄ 2 ¥ 121 ⁄ 2 in. (19.1 ¥ 31.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1920. House on a Hill, or The Buggy. Etching on copper. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. 1920. Les Deux Pigeons. Etching on copper. 87 ⁄ 16 ¥ 97 ⁄ 8 in. (21.4 ¥ 25.1 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. 1920. Train and Bathers. Etching on copper. 85 ⁄ 16 ¥ 913 ⁄ 16 in. (21.1 ¥ 25 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. c. 1920–23. East River. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 46 in. (81.3 ¥ 116.8 cm). Private Collection. 1921. Evening Wind. Etching on copper. 67 ⁄ 8 ¥ 81 ⁄ 4 in. (17.5 ¥ 21 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1921. Night in the Park. Etching on copper. 7 ¥ 81 ⁄4 in. (17.8 ¥ 21 cm). Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma. 1921. Night Shadows. Etching on copper. 615 ⁄ 16 ¥ 81 ⁄ 8 in. (17.6 ¥ 20.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1921. House Tops. Etching on copper. 6 ¥ 8 in. (15.2 ¥ 20.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. c. 1921. Girl at a Sewing Machine. Oil on canvas. 19 ¥ 18 in. (48.3 ¥ 45.7 cm). The ThyssenBornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain. c. 1921. New York Interior. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1921–23. Moonlight Interior. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Private Collection. 1922. East Side Interior. Etching on copper. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. c. 1922. New York Restaurant. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 30 in. (61 ¥ 76.2 cm). Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Michigan. 1922. The Railroad. Etching on copper. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1922. The Cat Boat. Etching on copper. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1922–23. Railroad Crossing. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 393 ⁄ 4 in. (73.7 ¥ 101 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923. Eastern Point Light. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1923. House at Tarrytown. Drypoint on zinc. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923. The Locomotive. Etching on copper. 77 ⁄ 8 ¥ 913 ⁄ 16 in. (20 ¥ 25 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1923. The Lonely House. Etching on copper. 77 ⁄ 8 ¥ 97 ⁄ 8 in. (20 ¥ 25.1 cm). The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania. 1923. The Lighthouse. Etching on copper. 10 ¥ 12 in. (25.4 ¥ 30.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923. Dead Trees. Watercolor on paper. 13 ¥ 19 in. (33 ¥ 48.3 cm). Private Collection. 1923. Beam Trawler, the Seal. Watercolor on paper. 151 ⁄ 4 ¥ 191 ⁄ 4 in. (33.7 ¥ 48.8 cm). Private Collection. 1923. Deck of Beam Trawler. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Appendix C

162

1923. Houses of Squam Light. Watercolor on paper. 111 ⁄ 4 ¥ 177 ⁄ 16 in. (28.6 ¥ 44.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1923. Shacks at Lanesville. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Collection of Emilio Carlo Orecchia. 1923. Haskell’s House. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 1923. New England House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1923. Italian Quarter. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1923. House in Italian Quarter. Watercolor on paper. 197 ⁄ 8 ¥ 237 ⁄ 8 in. (50.5 ¥ 60.6 cm). National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1923. House with a Bay Window. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Private Collection. 1923. House with Fence. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Kennedy Galleries, New York. 1923. The Mansard Roof. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. 1923. Portuguese Church. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34 ¥ 50 cm). Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. 1923. Portuguese Quarter. Watercolor on paper. 12 ¥ 18 in. (30.5 ¥ 45.7 cm). Private Collection. 1923. Apple Trees. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 1815 ⁄ 16 in. (29.8 ¥ 48.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923. House and Boats*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee. 1923. Apartment Houses. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 2815 ⁄ 16 in. (61 ¥ 73.5 cm). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1923 or 1924. The Pine Tree. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Location unknown. 1923 or 1924. Victorian House*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Street Corner*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Houses on the Beach, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 4 in. (34.3 ¥ 48.9 cm). Private Collection. 1923 or 1924. Group of Houses*. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Gloucester Houses*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Back Street, Gloucester*. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (33.5 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. White House with Dormer Window*. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Outhouses*. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 18 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. House by the Sea*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Bell Tower*. Watercolor on paper. 13 15 ⁄ 16 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Small Town on Cove*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Jo Sketching at Good Harbor Beach*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Blynman Bridge*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Trawler in Dock. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection.

163

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1923 or 1924. Trawler*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Two Trawlers*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Destroyer and Rocky Shore*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Rocky Shore and Water*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1923 or 1924. Sailboat with Figures*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1924. Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks. Watercolor on paper. 11 ¥ 17 in. (27.9 ¥ 44.5 cm). Private Collection. 1924. House on the Shore. Watercolor on paper. 171 ⁄ 2 ¥ 231 ⁄ 2 in. (44.5 ¥ 59.7 cm). Private Collection. 1924. Gloucester Factory and House. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Private Collection. 1924. Gloucester Mansion. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄ 8 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34 ¥ 49.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1924. Haskell’s House. Watercolor on paperboard. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1924. House and Harbor. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄2 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Private Collection. 1924. Parkhurst’s House. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 19 in. (34.9 ¥ 48.3 cm). Private Collection. 1924. House at the Fort, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄8 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (33.9 ¥ 49.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 1924. Rocks at the Fort. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.5 ¥ 50.8 cm). Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. 1924. Landscape with Rocks*. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 1715 ⁄ 16 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1924. Rocks and House*. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 1715 ⁄ 16 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1924. House above a River*. Watercolor on paper. 113 ⁄ 4 ¥ 1715 ⁄ 16 in. (29.8 ¥ 45.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1924 or 1925. New York Pavements. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia. 1924 –27. Reclining Nude*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1924. Jo Sleeping*. Watercolor on paper. 1111 ⁄ 16 ¥ 18 in. (29.7 ¥ 45.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. The Bootleggers. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 38 in. (76.2 ¥ 96.5 cm). Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire. 1925. Adobe Houses. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1925. Adobes and Shed, New Mexico*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. Interior. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄16 ¥ 197 ⁄8 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois. 1925. D. & R.G. Locomotive. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1925. Locomotive and Freight Car*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 19 15 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. La Penitente. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 195 ⁄ 8 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.8 cm). Location unknown. 1925. Pink House with Stone Wall*. Watercolor on paper. 157 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. Poplars. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 7 1925. Railroad Trestle in the Desert*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 19 ⁄8 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Appendix C

164

1925. House near a Dry Stream*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. Ranch House, Santa Fe. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄ 4 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (34.9 ¥ 50.2 cm). Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 1925. St. Francis Towers, Santa Fe. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 1925. Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. Skyline Near Washington Square. Watercolor on cardboard. 151 ⁄ 16 ¥ 219 ⁄ 16 in. (38.3 ¥ 54.8 cm). Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York. 1925. Day After the Funeral. Watercolor on paper. 15 ¥ 20 in. (38.1 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1925. Manhattan Bridge. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄16 in. (35.3 ¥ 50.6 cm). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1925. Manhattan Bridge*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1925. House by the Railroad. Oil on canvas. 24 ¥ 29 in. (61 ¥ 73.7 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1925–30. Self-Portrait*. Oil on canvas. 251 ⁄ 8 ¥ 201 ⁄ 4 in. (63.8 ¥ 51.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1926. Manhattan Bridge Entrance. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Location unknown. 1926. Roofs, Washington Square. Watercolor over charcoal on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1926. Skylights. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Location unknown. 1926. Rooftops*. Watercolor on paper. 127 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (32.7 ¥ 50.5 cm). Whitney Museum of America Art, New York. 1926. Mrs. Acorn’s Parlor. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1926. Haunted House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. 1926. Talbot’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1926. Lime Rock Railroad. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.5 ¥ 50.5 cm). Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. 1926. Railroad Crossing, Rockland, Maine. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. 1926. Civil War Campground. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 4 in. (34.3 ¥ 48.9 cm). The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, St. Joseph, Missouri. 1926. Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. 1926. Anderson’s House. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1926. Davis House. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1926. Universalist Church. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey. 1926. Gloucester Harbor. Watercolor on paper. 141 ⁄ 2 ¥ 20 in. (36.8 ¥ 50.8 cm). Southwestern Bell Corporation, San Antonio, Texas. 1926. Trees, East Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Location unknown. 1926. Sunday. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 34 in. (73.7 ¥ 86.4 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 1926. Eleven A.M. Watercolor on paper. 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 361 ⁄ 8 in. (71.3 ¥ 91.6 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 1926. Gloucester Street. Oil on canvas. 28 ¥ 36 in. (71.1 ¥ 91.4 cm). Private Collection. 1927. Coast Guard Station. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

165

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1927. Foreshore-Two Lights. Watercolor on paper. 135 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (34.6 ¥ 50.5 cm). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. 1927. Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Watercolor on paper. 139 ⁄ 16 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.4 ¥ 49.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1927. Light at Two Lights. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. 1927. House of the Fog Horn I. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1927. House of the Fog Horn II. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1927. Bill Latham’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1927. Custom House, Portland. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. 1927. Libby House, Portland. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1913 ⁄ 16 in. (35.3 ¥ 50.6 cm). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1927. Portland Head Light, or Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 inches (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1927. Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.5 in). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. 1927. Rocky Pedestal. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (36 ¥ 50 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1927. Cars and Rocks*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1927. Automat. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 36 in. (71.4 ¥ 91.4 cm). The Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa. 1927. The City. Oil on canvas. 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 37 in. (69.9 ¥ 94 cm). The University of Arizona, Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona. 1927. Two on the Aisle. Oil on canvas. 401 ⁄ 4 ¥ 481 ⁄ 4 in. (102.2 ¥ 122.6 cm). Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio. 1927. Lighthouse Hill. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 16 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (73.8 ¥ 102.2 cm). Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas. 1927. Captain Upton’s House. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 361 ⁄ 4 in. (71.8 ¥ 92.1 cm). Collection of Steve Martin. 1927. Drug Store. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (73.7 ¥ 101.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1928. The Balcony, or The Movies. Drypoint on Zinc. 8 ¥ 10 in. (20.3 ¥ 25.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1928. Adam’s House. Watercolor with charcoal on paper. 16 ¥ 25 in. (40.6 ¥ 63.5 cm). Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. 1928. Back Street, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1928. Box Factory, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1928. Cape Ann Pasture. Watercolor on paper. 139 ⁄ 16 ¥ 213 ⁄ 8 in. (34.4 ¥ 54.3 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1928. Circus Wagon. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1928. Gloucester Roofs. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. James A. Fisher. 1928. House on Middle Street, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire. 1928. House at Riverdale. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 197 ⁄ 8 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. 1928. Marty Welch’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Thune.

Appendix C

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1928. Prospect Street, Gloucester. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Collection of Barbaralee Diamonstein and Carl Spielvogel. 1928. Railroad Gates. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 21 in. (35.6 ¥ 53.3 cm). Private Collection. 1928. Sultry Day. Watercolor on paper. 135 ⁄ 8 ¥ 193 ⁄ 8 in. (34.6 ¥ 48.7 cm). Collection of Kathy and Bruce Hornsby. 1928. Factory and Shed*. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1928. My Roof. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain. 1928. From Williamsburg Bridge. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1928. Manhattan Bridge Loop. Oil on canvas. 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. 1928. Cape Ann Granite. Oil on canvas. 28 ¥ 40 in. (71.1 ¥ 101.6 cm). Private Collection. 1928. Freight Cars, Gloucester. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (74 ¥ 102.2 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. 1928. Hodgkin’s House. Oil on canvas. 28 ¥ 36 in. (71.1 ¥ 91.4 cm). Private Collection. 1928. Blackwell’s Island. Oil on canvas. 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm). Private Collection. 1928. Night Windows. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 34 in. (73.7 ¥ 86.4 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1929. Ash’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1929. Baptistry of St. John’s. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina. 1929. Charleston Doorway. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.2 cm). Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. 1929. Charleston Slum. Watercolor on paper. 153 ⁄4 ¥ 243⁄4 in. (34.9 ¥ 62.9 cm). Private Collection. 1929. House with Veranda, Charleston, S.C.* Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 20 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1929. Folly Beach. Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1929. Negro Cabin. Watercolor on paper. 141 ⁄ 2 ¥ 201 ⁄ 2 in. (36.8 ¥ 52.1 cm). Location Unknown. 1929. Automobile Near a Cabin*. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1929. Cabin, Charleston, S.C.* Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1929. The Battery, Charleston S.C.* Watercolor on paper. 137 ⁄ 8 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.2 ¥ 50.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1929. Fort and Gun*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1929. Lighthouse Village. Watercolor on paper. 153 ⁄ 4 ¥ 2415 ⁄ 16 in. (40.5 ¥ 63.3 cm). Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. 1929. House of the Fog Horn III. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 1915 ⁄ 16 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1929. Pemaquid Light. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine. 1929. Barn at Essex. Watercolor on paper. 16 ¥ 25 in. (40.6 ¥ 63.5 cm). Private Collection. 1929. Chop Suey. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 38 in. (81.3 ¥ 96.5 cm). Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. 1929. The Lighthouse at Two Lights. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 2 ¥ 431 ⁄ 4 in. (74.9 ¥ 109.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1929. Coast Guard Station. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm). Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey. 1929. Railroad Sunset. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 473 ⁄ 4 in. (71.8 ¥ 121.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

167

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1930. Burly Cobb Hen Coop and Barn. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄ 2 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Private Collection. 1930. Burly Cobb’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1930. Truro Station Coal Box. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. 1930. Highland Light, North Truro. Watercolor on paper. 165 ⁄ 8 ¥ 253 ⁄ 4 in. (42.3 ¥ 65.3 cm). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1930. House in Provincetown. Watercolor on paper. 201 ⁄ 4 ¥ 251 ⁄ 2 in. (51.4 ¥ 64.8 cm). Fred Jones, Jr., Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. 1930. Methodist Church Tower. Watercolor on paper. 25 ¥ 19 3 ⁄ 4 in. (63.5 ¥ 50.2 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. 1930. North Truro Station. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. 1930. House by an Inlet. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 38 in. (66 ¥ 96.5 cm). Private Collection. 1930. Early Sunday Morning. Oil on canvas. 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1930. South Truro Church. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 43 in. (73.7 ¥ 109.2 cm). Private Collection. 1930. Corn Hill, Truro. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 2 ¥ 421 ⁄ 2 in. (72.4 ¥ 108 cm). Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. 1930. Hills, South Truro. Oil on canvas. 273 ⁄ 8 ¥ 431 ⁄ 8 in. (69.2 ¥ 109.2 cm). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. 1930. Tables for Ladies. Oil on canvas. 481 ⁄ 4 ¥ 601 ⁄ 4 in. (122.6 ¥ 153 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1930. Apartment Houses, Harlem River*. Oil on canvas. 35 ¥ 60 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1930–33. Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro*. Oil on canvas. 243 ⁄ 4 ¥ 36 in. (62.9 ¥ 91.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1930–33. Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses*. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 2 ¥ 423 ⁄ 4 in. (72.4 ¥ 108.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1930–33. Cobb’s Barns, South Truro*. Oil on canvas. 34 ¥ 493 ⁄ 4 in. (86.4 ¥ 126.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1931. Captain Kelly’s House. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 247 ⁄ 8 in. (50.8 ¥ 63.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1931. Freight Car at Truro. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄ 4 ¥ 193 ⁄ 4 in. (34.9 ¥ 50.2 cm). Adelson Galleries, New York. 1931. House on Dune Edge. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1931. Railroad Warning. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1931. Roofs of the Cobb Barn. Watercolor on paper. 191 ⁄ 2 ¥ 271 ⁄4 in. (49.5 ¥ 69.2 cm). Collection of Charles and Marjorie Benton. 1931. Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses*. Watercolor on paper. 217 ⁄ 8 ¥ 293 ⁄ 4 in. (55.6 ¥ 75.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1931. Hotel Room. Oil on canvas. 60 ¥ 651 ⁄ 4 in. (152.4 ¥ 165.7 cm). Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain. 1931. The Camel’s Hump. Oil on canvas. 321 ⁄ 4 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (81.9 ¥ 127.6 cm). Munson-WilliamsProctor Arts Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York. 1931. New York, New Haven and Hartford. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm). Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. 1931. Barber Shop. Oil on canvas. 60 ¥ 78 in. (152.4 ¥ 198.1 cm). Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, New York. 1932. Back of Freight Station. Watercolor on paper. 13 ¥ 19 in. (33 ¥ 48.3 cm). Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery, Canajoharie, New York. 1932. House at Eastham. Watercolor on paper. 191 ⁄ 2 ¥ 271 ⁄ 2 in. (49.5 ¥ 69.9 cm). Private Collection. 1932. Kelly Jenness House. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 28 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.1 cm). Private Collection.

Appendix C

168

1932. Marshall’s House. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. 1932. Railroad Embankment. Watercolor on paper. 131 ⁄2 ¥ 191 ⁄2 in. (34.3 ¥ 49.5 cm). Private Collection. 1932. Room in Brooklyn. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 8 ¥ 34 in. (74 ¥ 86.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. 1932. Room in New York. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 36 in. (73.7 ¥ 91.4 cm). Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska. 1932. Dauphinée House. Oil on canvas. 34 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (86.4 ¥ 127.6 cm). Private Collection. 1932. Mrs. Scott’s House. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 501 ⁄ 2 in. (66 ¥ 128.3 cm). Maier Museum of Art, Randolph-Macon Women’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia. 1932. City Roofs. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 36 in. (73.7 ¥ 91.4 cm). Private Collection. 1932 and 1959. November, Washington Square. Oil on canvas. 341 ⁄ 8 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (86.7 ¥ 127.6 cm). Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California. 1933. Ryder’s House. Oil on canvas. 361 ⁄ 8 ¥ 50 in. (91.6 ¥ 127 cm). National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1934. The Forked Road. Watercolor on paper. 197 ⁄ 8 ¥ 277 ⁄ 8 in. (50.5 ¥ 70.8 cm). Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa. 1934. House on Pamet River. Watercolor on paper. 193 ⁄ 4 ¥ 25 in. (50.2 ¥ 63.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1934. Jenness House Looking North. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 28 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.1 cm). John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida. 1934. Jenness House III. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private Collection. 1934. Jenness House IV. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 201 ⁄ 16 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.9 cm). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1934 –38. Jo Sketching in the Truro House*. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1934. Cape Cod Sunset. Oil on canvas. 287 ⁄ 8 ¥ 357 ⁄ 8 in. (73.3 ¥ 91.1 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1934. Sun on Prospect Street. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 361 ⁄ 4 in. (71.4 ¥ 92.1 cm). Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio. 1934. Dawn Before Gettysburg. Oil on canvas. 15 ¥ 20 in. (38.1 ¥ 50.8 cm). Westervelt Warner Museum of American Art, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 1934. East Wind over Weehawken. Oil on canvas. 34 ¥ 501 ⁄4 in. (86.4 ¥ 127.6 cm). Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1935. House with Big Pine. Watercolor on paper. 201 ⁄ 2 ¥ 251 ⁄ 4 in. (52 ¥ 64.1 cm). Private Collection. 1935. Yawl Riding a Swell. Watercolor on paper. 197 ⁄ 8 ¥ 273 ⁄ 4 in. (50.2 ¥ 70.5 cm). Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. 1935. House at Dusk. Oil on canvas. 361 ⁄ 4 ¥ 50 in. (92.1 ¥ 127 cm). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. 1935. Macomb’s Dam Bridge. Oil on canvas. 35 ¥ 603 ⁄ 16 in. (88.9 ¥ 152.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, New York. 1935. Shakespeare at Dusk. Oil on canvas. 17 ¥ 25 in. (43.2 ¥ 63.5 cm). Collection of Carl D. Lobell. 1935. The Long Leg. Oil on canvas. 20 ¥ 301 ⁄ 4 in. (50.8 ¥ 76.8 cm). Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California. 1936. House with a Rain Barrel. Watercolor on paper. 191 ⁄ 2 ¥ 271 ⁄ 2 in. (49.5 ¥ 70 cm). Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana. 1936. Oaks at Eastham. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 28 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.1 cm). Private Collection. 1936. Toward Boston. Watercolor on paper. 14 ¥ 20 in. (35.6 ¥ 50.8 cm). Private collection. 1936. Jo Painting. Oil on canvas. 18 ¥ 16 in. (45.7 ¥ 40.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1936. The Circle Theatre. Oil on canvas. 27 ¥ 36 in. (68.6 ¥ 91.4 cm). Private Collection. 3 1936. Cape Cod Afternoon. Oil on canvas. 34 ⁄16 ¥ 501 ⁄ 16 in. (87 ¥ 127 cm). The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

169

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1937. Mouth of Pamet River — Full Tide. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 281 ⁄ 4 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.8 cm). Private Collection. 1937. White River at Sharon. Watercolor on paper. 213 ⁄ 4 ¥ 293 ⁄ 4 in. (55.3 ¥ 75.6 cm). National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1937. The Sheridan Theatre. Oil on canvas. 171 ⁄ 8 ¥ 251 ⁄ 4 in. (43.5 ¥ 64.1 cm). The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey. 1937. French Six-Day Rider. Oil on canvas. 171 ⁄ 4 ¥ 191 ⁄ 4 in. (43.8 ¥ 48.9 cm). Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. 1937. Five A. M. Oil on canvas. 25 ¥ 36 in. (63.5 ¥ 91.4 cm). Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. 1938. Crossing at Eastham. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 28 in. (50.8 ¥ 71.1 cm). Private Collection. 1938. Cottages at North Truro. Watercolor on paper. 203 ⁄ 16 ¥ 281 ⁄ 8 in. (52.9 ¥ 71.4 cm). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth. 1938. Compartment C, Car 293. Oil on canvas. 20 ¥ 18 in. (50.8 ¥ 45.7 cm). Collection of I.B.M. Corporation, Armonk, New York. 1939. New York Movie. Oil on canvas. 321 ⁄ 4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (81.9 ¥ 101.9 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1939. Bridle Path. Oil on canvas. 283 ⁄ 8 ¥ 421 ⁄ 8 in. (72.1 ¥ 107.7 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. 1939. Cape Cod Evening. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1939. Ground Swell. Oil on canvas. 361 ⁄ 2 ¥ 501 ⁄ 4 in. (92.7 ¥ 127.6 cm). The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 1939. The MacArthurs’ Home, “Pretty Penny.” Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 40 in. (73.6 ¥ 101.6 cm). Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. 3 1940. Ofﬁce at Night. Oil on canvas. 22 ⁄16 ¥ 251 ⁄ 8 in. (56.4 ¥ 63.8 cm). Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. 1940. Light Battery at Gettysburg. Oil on canvas. 181 ⁄ 8 ¥ 271 ⁄ 4 in. (46 ¥ 69.2 cm). The NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. 1940. Gas. Oil on canvas. 261 ⁄ 4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 4 in. (66.7 ¥ 102.2 cm). Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1941. House at San Mateo. Watercolor on paper. 133 ⁄ 4 ¥ 191 ⁄ 2 in. (34.9 ¥ 49.5 cm). Collection of Agnes Albert. 1941. Girlie Show. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 38 in. (81.3 ¥ 96.5 cm). Private Collection. 1941. Lee Shore. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 43 in. (71.8 ¥ 109.2 cm). Private Collection. 1941. Route 6, Eastham. Oil on canvas. 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 381 ⁄ 4 in. (69.9 ¥ 97.2 cm). Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana. 1942. Nighthawks. Oil on canvas. 331 ⁄ 8 ¥ 60 in. (84.1 ¥ 152.4 cm). Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 1942. Dawn in Pennsylvania. Oil on canvas. 243 ⁄ 8 ¥ 441 ⁄4 in. (61.9 ¥ 112.4 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois. 1943. Sierra Madre at Monterrey. Watercolor on paper. 211 ⁄ 4 ¥ 293 ⁄ 4 in. (54 ¥ 75.6 cm). Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois. 1943. Palms at Saltillo. Watercolor on paper. 20 ¥ 25 in. (50.8 ¥ 63.5 cm). Private Collection. 1943. Saltillo Rooftops. Watercolor on paper. 211 ⁄ 2 ¥ 295 ⁄ 8 in. (54.6 ¥ 75.2 cm). Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1943. Saltillo Mansion. Watercolor on paper. 211 ⁄ 4 ¥ 271 ⁄ 8 in. (54 ¥ 68.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1943. Monterrey Cathedral. Watercolor on paper. 213 ⁄ 4 ¥ 305 ⁄ 16 in. (55.2 ¥ 77 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1943. Hotel Lobby. Oil on canvas. 321 ⁄ 4 ¥ 403 ⁄ 4 in. (81.9 ¥ 103.5 cm). Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. 1943. Summertime. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 8 ¥ 44 in. (74 ¥ 111.8 cm). Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware. 1944. Morning in a City. Oil on canvas. 445 ⁄ 16 ¥ 5913 ⁄ 16 in. (112.5 ¥ 152 cm). Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Appendix C

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1944. The Martha McKeen of Wellﬂeet. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm). ThyssenBornemisza Collection, Madrid, Spain. 1944. Solitude #56. Oil on canvas. 32 ¥ 50 in. (81.3 ¥ 127 cm). Private Collection. 1945. August in the City. Oil on canvas. 23 ¥ 30 in. (58.4 ¥ 76.2 cm). Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. 1945. Rooms for Tourists. Oil on canvas. 301 ⁄ 4 ¥ 421 ⁄ 8 in. (76.8 ¥ 107 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1945. Two Puritans. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). Private Collection. 1946. El Palacio. Watercolor on paper. 203 ⁄ 4 ¥ 285 ⁄ 8 in. (52.7 ¥ 72.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1946. Church of San Esteban. Watercolor on paper. 221 ⁄ 4 ¥ 301 ⁄ 2 in. (56.5 ¥ 77.5 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1946. Construction, Saltillo. Watercolor on paper. 21 ¥ 29 in. (53.3 ¥ 73.7 cm). Private Collection. 1946. Roofs, Saltillo*. Watercolor on paper. 227 ⁄ 8 ¥ 305 ⁄ 8 in. (58.1 ¥ 77.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1946. Mount Moran. Watercolor on paper. 203 ⁄4 ¥ 281 ⁄2 in. (52.7 ¥ 72.4 cm). Private Collection. 1946. Jo in Wyoming. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1946. Slopes of Grand Teton. Watercolor on paper. 1315 ⁄ 16 ¥ 20 in. (35.4 ¥ 50.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1946. Approaching a City. Oil on canvas. 271 ⁄ 8 ¥ 36 in. (68.9 ¥ 91.4 cm). The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. 1946. October on Cape Cod. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 42 in. (66 ¥ 106.7 cm). Collection of Loretta and Robert K. Lifton. 1947. Pennsylvania Coal Town. Oil on canvas. 28 ¥ 40 in. (71.1 ¥ 101.6 cm). The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. 1947. Summer Evening. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 42 in. (76.2 ¥ 106.7 cm). Private Collection. 1948. Church in Eastham*. Watercolor on paper. 215 ⁄ 8 ¥ 261 ⁄ 2 in. (54.8 ¥ 67.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1948. Seven A.M. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1949. Conference at Night. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 4 ¥ 405 ⁄ 16 in. (71.8 ¥ 102.6 cm). Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. 1949. Stairway*. Oil on wood. 16 ¥ 117 ⁄ 8 in. (40.6 ¥ 30.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1949. High Noon. Oil on canvas. 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 391 ⁄ 2 in. (69.9 ¥ 100.3 cm). The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. 1949. Summer in the City. Oil on canvas. 20 ¥ 30 in. (50.8 ¥ 76.2 cm). Private Collection. 1950. Portrait of Orleans. Oil on canvas. 26 ¥ 40 in. (66 ¥ 101.6 cm). de Young Museum, San Francisco, California. 1950. Cape Cod Morning. Oil on canvas. 341 ⁄ 4 ¥ 40.8 in. (87 ¥ 101.9 cm). National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1951. First Row Orchestra. Oil on canvas. 311 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (79 ¥ 101.9 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 1951. Rooms by the Sea. Oil on canvas. 291 ⁄ 4 ¥ 40 in. (74.3 ¥ 101.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1952. Morning Sun. Oil on canvas. 281 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (71.4 ¥ 101.9 cm). Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. 1952. Hotel by a Railroad. Oil on canvas. 311 ⁄4 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (79.4 ¥ 101.9 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 1952. Sea Watchers. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). Private Collection. 1953. Cliffs near Mitla, Oaxaca. Watercolor on paper. 201 ⁄ 2 ¥ 281 ⁄ 4 in. (52.1 ¥ 71.8 cm). Private Collection. 1953–54. Mountains at Guanajuato, or Guanajuato, Mexico. Watercolor on paper. 225 ⁄ 8 ¥ 309 ⁄ 16 in. (57.4 ¥ 77.6 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

171

Chronology of Cited Artworks

1953. Ofﬁce in a Small City. Oil on canvas. 28 ¥ 40 in. (71.1 ¥ 101.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1954. City Sunlight. Oil on canvas. 283 ⁄ 16 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (71.6 ¥ 101.9). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. 1955. South Carolina Morning, or Carolina Morning. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1955. Hotel Window. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 55 in. (101.6 ¥ 139.7 cm). Private Collection. 1956. Sunlight on Brownstones. Oil on canvas. 303 ⁄ 8 ¥ 401 ⁄ 8 in. (77.2 ¥ 101.9 cm). Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. 1956. Four Lane Road. Oil on canvas. 271 ⁄ 2 ¥ 411 ⁄ 2 in. (69.9 ¥ 105.4 cm). Private Collection. 1957. California Hills. Watercolor on paper. 211 ⁄ 2 ¥ 291 ⁄ 4 in. (54.6 ¥ 74.3 cm). Hallmark Fine Art Collection, Kansas City, Missouri. 1957. Western Motel. Oil on canvas. 305 ⁄ 8 ¥ 501 ⁄ 2 in. (77.8 ¥ 128.3 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1958. Sunlight in a Cafeteria. Oil on canvas. 403 ⁄16 ¥ 601 ⁄8 in. (102.1 ¥ 152.7 cm). Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. 1959. Excursion into Philosophy. Oil on canvas. 30 ¥ 40 in. (76.2 ¥ 101.6 cm). Private Collection. 1960. People in the Sun. Oil on canvas. 403 ⁄ 8 ¥ 603 ⁄ 8 in. (102.6 ¥ 153.4 cm). National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. 1960. Second Story Sunlight. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 50 in. (101.6 ¥ 127 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1961. A Woman in the Sun. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 60 in. (101.6 ¥ 152.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1962. Mass of Trees at Eastham. Watercolor on paper. 221 ⁄ 2 ¥ 307 ⁄ 16 in. (57.2 ¥ 77.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1962. New York Ofﬁce. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 55 in. (101.6 ¥ 139.7 cm). Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. 1962. Road and Trees. Oil on canvas. 34 ¥ 60 in. (86.4 ¥ 152.4 cm). Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel W. Dietrich II. 1963. Intermission. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 60 in. (101.6 ¥ 152.4 cm). Private Collection. 1963. Sun in an Empty Room. Oil on canvas. 283 ⁄ 4 ¥ 391 ⁄ 2 in. (73 ¥ 100.3 cm). Private Collection. 1965. Cape Cod Bay. Watercolor on paper. 221 ⁄ 8 ¥ 297 ⁄ 8 in. (56.2 ¥ 75.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1965. Chair Car. Oil on canvas. 40 ¥ 50 in. (101.6 ¥ 127 cm). Private Collection. 1966. Two Comedians. Oil on canvas. 29 ¥ 40 in. (73.7 ¥ 101.6 cm). Private Collection.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aidin, Rose. “A Wall for Every Work: An Interview with Barney Ebsworth.” Apollo, October 18, 2008. Agee, William C., and Barbara Rose. Patrick Henry Bruce, American Modernist: A Catalog Raisonné. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979. American Lighthouse Foundation. “New U.S. Postage Stamp Has a Lighthouse Connection.” http://www.lighthousefoundation.org/alf_lights/ longpoint/hopperstamp09.htm. “Art: Artists’ Choice.” Time, November 5, 1945. “Art: Exhibition of Watercolors.” The New York Times, October 19, 1924. “Art Notes: First Exhibition of the Season at the Montross Galleries.” The New York Times, October 10, 1914. “The Art of Collecting.” Hamilton Alumni Review, Summer 2002. “Art: The Silent Witness.” Time, December 24, 1956. “Art: Traveling Man.” Time, January 19, 1948. “Art: Whitney Thermometer.” Time, December 10, 1934. “Artists’ Panel: Joel Meyerowitz, George Segal, William Bailey, with Gail Levin, Moderator.” Art Journal, Summer 1981. “Awards in Poster Contest.” The New York Times, August 14, 1918. Backer, Matt. “Edward Hopper: An Artist in Pursuit of Desire.” The Traditional Fine Arts Organization, March 24, 2006. http://www.tfaoi.org/ aa/6aa/6aa261.htm. Baigell, Matthew. The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930s. New York: Praeger, 1974. _____. “The Silent Witness of Edward Hopper.” Arts Magazine, September 1974. Barr, Alfred Hamilton, Jr., ed. Edward Hopper, Retrospective Exhibition, November 1–December 7, 1933, with essays by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Charles Burchﬁeld and Edward Hopper. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1933.

Barter, Judith A. “Nighthawks: Transcending Reality,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. _____. “Travels and Travails: Hopper’s Late Pictures,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. Bayles, Martha. “Hopper’s World: Solitude, Light, and Harbingers of Death.” Weekly Standard, October 15, 2007. Berkow, Ita G. Edward Hopper: An American Master. New York: Smithmark, 1996. Berman, Avis. Edward Hopper’s New York. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2005. _____.” The Force Behind the Whitney.” American Heritage, September/October 1989. _____. Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Biddle, Flora Miller. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made. New York: Arcade, 1999. Bochner, Paul. “Someplace Like Home.” The Atlantic, Monthly, May 1996. Bonnefoy, Yves. “The Photosynthesis of Being,” tr. by Richard Stamelman, in François Bonnefoy (ed.), Edward Hopper. Secaucus, NJ: Wellﬂeet Press, 1989. Botton, Alain de. “How to See Sadness Without Being Sad.” The Telegraph, May 8, 2004. _____. “The Pleasure of Sadness: Alain de Botton on Edward Hopper.” Tate Etc., Summer 2004. Boyd, William. “The Best and the Worst: Notes Towards a Deﬁnition of Edward Hopper.” Modern Painters, Summer 2004. The Boyhood World of Edward Hopper. Nyack, NY: Hopper House, 1979. Braddock, Alan. “Modernists in New Mexico: Works from a Private Collector.” Traditional Fine Arts Organization, 2009. Braff, Phyllis, “Looking at a ‘Time Capsule.’” The New York Times, June 2, 1985. Brettell, Richard R. Hopper in Paris. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993.

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Bibliography Breuning, Margaret. “Many New Exhibitions.” New York Post, February 19, 1927. Brown, Milton Wolf. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955. _____. The Story of the Armory Show. New York: Graphic Society, 1963. Burchﬁeld, Charles. “Hopper: Career of Silent Poetry.” Art News, March 1950. Burrey, Suzanne. “Edward Hopper: The Emptying Spaces.” Art Digest, April 1, 1955. Cacioppo, Nancy. “Pretty Penny Has Rich History.” The Journal News (Rockland County, New York), August 27, 1999. _____. “What the Artist Saw: The Rockland Scenes in Edward Hopper’s Paintings.” The Journal News (Rockland County, New York), May 11, 1990. Canaday, John. Embattled Critic: Views on Modern Art. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1962. _____. “Realistic Paintings Go on View Today.” The New York Times, October 10, 1961. _____. “Travelogue: A Doubleheader Down East.” The New York Times, August 1, 1971. Chaw, Walter. “Road to Perdition,” http://www. ﬁlmfreakcentral.net/dvdreviews/roadtoperdition. htm. Chilvers, Ian, ed. A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Clark, John. “Edward Hopper: Beyond Style.” Artscribe, December 1980. Clark, Lenore. Forbes Watson. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001. Coates, Robert M. “The Art Galleries: Edward Hopper.” The New Yorker, February 26, 1950. Cohen, David. “Hopper’s Cityscapes, Prior to the Paint.” New York Sun, August 7, 2008. Colleary, Elizabeth Thompson. “Josephine Nivison Hopper: Some Newly Discovered Works.” Woman’s Art Journal, Spring-Summer 2004. Comey, Janet L. “Painting Sunlight on the Coast of Maine.” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. Conforti, Michael. The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings. Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2006. Conlon, James. “Men Reading Women Reading: Interpreting Images of Women Readers,” in Frontiers, A Journal of Women’s Studies, June 1, 2005. Cook, Greg. “Visions of Isolation: Edward Hopper’s Master Works at the MFA.” The Boston Phoenix, May 2, 2007. Coppel, Stephen. American Prints: From Hopper to Pollock. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2008. Cork, Richard. “Light on the Darker Sides of Life.” The New Standard, February 12, 1981.

174 Cortissoz, Royal. “Charming Water Colors and Drawings.” New York Tribune, November 25, 1923. Cotter, Holland. “Hopper’s America, in Shadow and Light.” The New York Times, May 4, 2007. _____. “Hopper’s Views of the City of Light.” The New York Times, August 27, 1993. Cudlin, Jeffrey. “Squaresville, U.S.A.” Washington City Paper, October 5–11, 2007. Cumming, Laura. “The Quiet American.” The Observer (London, England), May 30, 2004. D’Arcy, David. “Last of the Breed.” Art & Auction, January 1, 2009. Davis, Elliot Bostwick. “Hopper’s Foundation” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. “Decorator Developed Professional Career from Hobby.” New York Sun, May 28, 1926. Demarest, Robert J. Traveling with Winslow Homer: America’s Premier Artist/Angler. New York: Apple Trees Productions, 2003. Dempsey, Patricia E. “Solitude’s Shore.” The Washington Post, March 29, 2009. Dickerson, Jan. “Americans Take Top Honors in Competition Sponsored by Firm Here.” The Kansas City Star, December 4, 1957. Dicum, Gregory. “Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light.” The New York Times, August 8, 2008. Doig, Peter. “Arts: A Brush with Genius.” The Guardian (London, England), March 5, 1996. Dorfman, John. “The Visionary.” Art & Antiques, October 1, 2009. Doss, Erica L. “Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, and Film Noir.” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, Winter 1983. Du Bois, Guy Pène. “The American Paintings of Edward Hopper.” Creative Art, March 1931. _____. Edward Hopper. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931. “The Early Roots of Edward Hopper’s Art.” Art Digest, January 15, 1941. Edgers, Geoff. “Preserved in Paint: Hopper’s Works Capture a Gloucester That Some Fear Is Fading.” The Boston Globe, May 27, 2007. “Edward Hopper: His Flair for the Pictorial Interpretation of the Spirit of Place.” New York Herald Tribune, November 5, 1933. Eliot, Alexander. Three Hundred Years of American Painting. New York: Time Incorporated, 1957. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self-Reliance, and Other Essays. New York: Dover Publications, 1993. Fasbach, Laura. “Hopper House Up for Sale: Historic Building at 318 N. Broadway Is on the Market for $450,000.” The Journal News (Rockland County, New York), September 18, 1999. Field, Kathy. “Looking Out, Looking In.” The Christian Science Monitor, September 4, 1981. Fischer, Lucy. “The Savage Eye: Edward Hopper

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Bibliography Interview between John Clancy and Paul Cummings, July 10, 1970. Smithsonian Archives of American Art, (audio clip). Iversen, Margaret. “In the Blind Field: Hopper and the Uncanny.” Art History 21, no. 3, September 1998. Jeffrey, Ian. “A Painter’s Strategies,” in Edward Hopper 1882 –1967. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981. Jewell, Edward Alden. “Aims and Attainments: This American Painter’s Work Admirably Presented at Museum of Modern Art.” The New York Times, November 5, 1933. Junker, Patricia. Edward Hopper: Women. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2008. Kennedy, Maev. “Only the Lonely: Tate Modern to Put On First British Display of Hopper’s Haunting and Iconic Work for Almost 30 Years.” The Guardian, May 15, 2004. Key, Donald. “Hopper Paintings Echo Aloneness in America.” The Milwaukee Journal, December 20, 1964. Kimball, Roger. “Splendid Isolation.” The Spectator, September 19, 2007. Knight, Christopher. “Steve Martin’s True Heaven.” Los Angeles Times, April 7, 2001. Knowles, Maggie. “Tripped Up: A Hopper, Skip and a Jump to Blahport.” The Portland Phoenix, July 2–8, 2004. Koob, Pamela N. Edward Hopper’s New York Movie. New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1998. _____. “States of Being; Edward Hopper and Symbolist Aesthetics.” American Art, Fall 2004. Kramer, Hilton. “Art: Another Side of Hopper.” The New York Times, September 28, 1979. _____. “Art: The Whitney Recognizes Hopper’s Special Place.” The New York Times, September 26, 1980. _____. The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture, 1972–1984. New York: The Free Press, 1985. Kranzfelder, Ivo. Edward Hopper 1882–1967: Vision of Reality, trans. John William Gabriel. Cologne: Taschen, 2002. Kreisberg, Louisa. “I Remember Edward Hopper.” The Journal News (Rockland County, New York), April 9, 1972. Kuh, Katharine. The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. _____. My Love Affair with Modern Art: Behind the Scenes with a Legendary Curator (edited and completed by Avis Berman). New York: Arcade Publishing, 2006. Kurlansky, Mark. The Last Fish Tale. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008. Lant, Antonia. “The Film Crowd,” in Nancy Mowll Mathews, Moving Pictures: American Art and

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177 Martin, Steve. “Thoughts on Art.” Southwest Art, September 1, 2001. Matt, Gerald, ed. Western Motel: Edward Hopper and Contemporary Art. Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2008. McGee, Kimberley, “Eye for Art: Steve Martin’s Prized Painting Collection Gets a Critical Look.” Las Vegas Sun, April 12, 2001. Mecklenburg, Virginia M. Edward Hopper: The Watercolors. New York and Washington, DC: W.W. Norton and the National Museum of American Art, 1999. _____. “Edward Hopper’s Houses.” Magazine Antiques, November 1999. Melikian, Souren. “Hopper Leads Record-Breaking Sale.” International Herald Tribune, May 13, 2005. Mellow, James R. “Hopper: More Than a Great American Realist.” The New York Times, July 16, 1972. _____. “The World of Edward Hopper.” The New York Times, September 5, 1971. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text. New York: W.W. Norton, 1967. Millard, Charles W. “Edward Hopper.” The Hudson Review, Autumn 1981. Murray, Mary E. American Twentieth-Century Watercolors at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. Utica, NY: The Board of Trustees, Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, 2000. “Museum Exhibits Edward Hopper.” Worcester (Massachusetts) Daily Telegram, May 3, 1963. Nemerov, Alexander. “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939.” American Art, Fall 2008. “New York Artists Win Three Awards.” The New York Times, January 27, 1935. O’Connor, John, Jr. “Patrons in Deed.” Art Digest, January 1, 1938. O’Doherty, Brian. American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982. _____. “Portrait: Edward Hopper.” Art in America, December 1964. “‘Palms of Saltillo’: A Water Color by Edward Hopper.” The Christian Science Monitor, March 8, 1944. Parks, John A. “Edward Hopper’s Preliminary Drawings.” Drawing, Winter 2006. Perlman, Bennard B. Painters of the Ashcan School: The Immortal Eight. New York: Dover Publications, 1988. _____. Robert Henri: His Life and Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. “Pete Shea, Poster Model, Joins Navy.” New York Sun, August 15, 1918. Pindelski, Thomas. “Edward Hopper and Photography.” Photographs, Photographers, Photography Blog, September 8, 2008. http://pindelski. org/photography/about.

Bibliography Preston, Stuart. “Art: Award to Hopper; Quarterly Honors Dean of U.S. Realist Painting.” The New York Times, December 16, 1960. _____. “Art: Hallmark Award, Edward Hopper Takes $2,000 First Prize.” The New York Times, December 4, 1957. Price, Charles Matlack. Poster Design: A Critical Study of the Development of the Poster in Continental Europe, England, and America. New York: George W. Brica, 1922. Read, Helen Appleton. “Brooklyn Museum Emphasizes New Talent in Initial Exhibition.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 18, 1923. _____. “Edward Hopper.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 5, 1933. _____. Robert Henri & Five of His Pupils. New York: Century Association, 1946. Reece, Childe. “Edward Hopper’s Etchings.” Art Magazine, April 1938. Reeves, Jean. “Death of Edward Hopper Ends Art Era in U.S.” Buffalo Evening News, May 22, 1967. Reinitz, Bertram. “Chop Suey’s New Role.” The New York Times, December 17, 1925. Renner, Rolf Günter. Edward Hopper 1882 –1967: Transformation of the Real. Cologne: Taschen, 1993. Ritter, Patricia C. Edward Hopper: The Early Years. Melbourne, FL: Brevard Art Center and Museum, 1980. Roberts, Ellen E. “Painting the Modern Cape: Hopper in Truro” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. Roberts, Jennifer. “Edward Hopper,” in Deborah Wye, Artists & Prints: Masterworks from the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004. Ross, Bruce. Venturing Upon Dizzy Heights: Lectures and Essays on Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Rothstein, Barbarie. “House, Home and Hopper.” Art & Antiques, September 2000. Rubenfeld, Richard L. “The American Scene: Realism and Social Concern” in Erika D. Passantino (ed.), The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making. Washington, DC: Phillips Collection in association with Yale University, 1999. Rubin, Kate. “Edward Hopper and the American Imagination.” Magazine Antiques, August 1995. Safran, Rose. “Edward Hopper in Maine: An Opportunity to Link Place and Paintings.” Maine Antiques Digest, August 11, 2005. Sanborn, Arthayer R. “Edward Hopper: His Rockland Heritage and Legacy,” in South of the Mountains, published by The Historical Society of Rockland County, July-September 1982. Scherer, Barrymore Laurence. “The New Collector: Of Etching and Edward Hopper.” Magazine Antiques, January 2009.

Bibliography Schjeldahl, Peter. The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Scheldahl, 1978 –1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. _____. “Ordinary People.” The New Yorker, May 21, 2007. Seitz, William C. “Edward Hopper: Realist, Classicist, Existentialist,” in Sao Paulo 9: United States of America; Edward Hopper: Environment U.S.A., 1957–1967. Washington, DC: Published for the National Collection of Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1967. Severens, Martha. “Southern Scene.” American Art Review, February 2001. Shattuck, Kathryn. “Entering an Expectant Realm in Hopper’s ‘Ofﬁce at Night.’” The New York Times, July 9, 2006. Sherburne, E. C. “The Hopper Exhibition.” The Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1933. Silberman, Robert. “Edward Hopper and the Theater of the Mind: Vision, Spectacle, and the Spectator” in Patricia McDonnell, On the Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth-Century American Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, in association with Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2002. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. “Six Who Knew Edward Hopper.” Art Journal, Summer 1981. Smith, Roberta. “Hopper Enlarged: The Father of Giants.” The New York Times, June 23, 1995. _____. “Review/Art; The Real World and Edward Hopper.” The New York Times, October 28, 1988. Soby, James Thrall. “Arrested Tune by Edward Hopper.” Saturday Review of Literature, March 4, 1950. Souter, Gerry. Edward Hopper: Light and Dark. New York: Parkstone Press, 2007. Stebbins, Theodore. American Master Drawings and Watercolors. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Stein, Susan Alyson. “Edward Hopper: The Uncrossed Threshold.” Arts Magazine, March 1980. Strand, Mark. “Crossing the Tracks to Hopper’s World.” The New York Times, October 17, 1971. _____. “Hopper: The Loneliness Factor.” in Daniel Halpern (ed.), Writers on Artists, San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988. “Sunlight in a Cafeteria.” Yale University Art Gallery. http://artgallery.yale.edu. Taggart, John. Remaining in Light: Ant Meditations on a Painting by Edward Hopper. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Theisen, Gordon. Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006.

178 “Three Races.” The New York Times, February 20, 1927. Treasures from the Collection of the Dayton Art Institute. “High Noon.” http://www.daytonartinstitute.org/exhibits/More_Info.html. Troyen, Carol. “Edward Hopper and Ryder’s House.” American Art, Summer 2006. _____. “Hopper in Gloucester,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. _____. “Hopper’s Women,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. _____. “‘The Sacredness of Everyday Fact’: Hopper’s Pictures of the City,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. _____. “‘A Stranger Worth Talking To’: Proﬁles and Portraits of Edward Hopper,” in Carol Troyen (ed.), Edward Hopper. Boston: MFA Publications, 2007. Tushnet, Eve. “Naked but Not Exposed: Edward Hopper at the National Gallery.” Commonweal, October 7, 2007. Tyler, Parker. “Hopper/Pollack.” Art News Annual, 1957. Updike, John. Still Looking: Essays on American Art. New York: Knopf, 2005. Van Riper, Frank. “Edward Hopper and the ‘Decisive Moment’: An American Realist Painter Captures Life in a Photographic Style.” ASPP The Picture Professional, Issue 2, 2008. Van Sicklen, Bill. “Hopper in the Hub.” The Providence Journal, May 4, 2007. Viatte, Germain. “Commentary on the Works” in Edward Hopper, tr. by Michael Edwards and Melissa Mizel. London: H.C. Blossom, 1991 Wagstaff, Sheena. “The Elation of Sunlight,” in Sheena Wagstaff (ed.), Edward Hopper. London: Tate Publishing, 2004. Ward, J. A. American Silences: The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans and Edward Hopper. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Warkel, Harriet G. Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s Hotel Lobby. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2008. Watson, Forbes. “A Note on Edward Hopper.” Vanity Fair, February 1929. Weinberg, Adam D. American Art of the Twentieth Century: Treasures of the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Abbeville Press, 1997. Wells, Walter. Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper. New York: Phaidon Press, 2007. Whalen, Richard F. Truro: The Story of a Cape Cod Town. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2007. “Whitney Curator Hankins on Hopper.” News of the Mint Museums, January-February 2003. Whitney Museum of American Art, Juliana Force

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INDEX Entries and page numbers in bold indicate main entries. abstract art 5, 16, 18, 19, 19–20, 100, 105–106, 111, 131, 154 Adams, Robert 104 Adam’s House 5–6, 53 Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts 150 Adobe Houses 6, 15, 120, 149 Adobes and Shed, New Mexico 120 Aidin, Rose 2 Albert, Agnes 64 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City 49, 153 American Artist (magazine) 86 The American Friend (film) 140– 141 American Landscape 6, 44, 110 American Scene Painting 6–7, 18 American Village 7, 148 Anderson Galleries, New York City 149 Anderson’s House 7, 53, 69 Anshutz, Thomas Pollock 7–8, 39 Antique Trader (magazine) 89 Apartment Houses 8, 90, 149 Apartment Houses, Harlem River 8, 90 Apple Trees 52 Approaching a City 8, 12, 16, 90, 110, 123 Après-midi de Juin 8–9, 70 Arbus, Diane 104 Armory Show 9, 30, 108, 117, 148 Armstrong, Louis 26 Art & Antiques (magazine) 18 Art & Auction (magazine) 36 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 156 Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 156 Art Gallery of Toronto 87 Art Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson 155 Art in America (magazine) 99, 110, 154 Art Institute of Chicago 32, 40, 75, 86–87, 87, 95, 105, 116, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155

Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christie 156 art nouveau 136 Art Students League, New York City 75, 140, 142 Arthur ( Jo’s cat) 9, 23 Artist’s Bedroom, Nyack 10, 98 The Arts (magazine) 53, 124, 129, 140, 149 Arts and Decoration (magazine) 38 Arts Club of Chicago 19 Ashcan School 10, 12, 42, 51, 52, 72, 110, 122–123, 124 Ash’s House 10–11, 25 Aspen Center for Visual Arts, Colorado 156 August in the City 11, 90 Automat 11, 90, 100 automobile 11–12, 18, 23–24, 25, 34, 73, 82, 107, 136 Automobile Near a Cabin 11, 25 Avery, Milton 52 Back of Freight Station 110 Back Street, Gloucester (1923– 1924) 52 Back Street, Gloucester (1928) 53 Backer, Matt 34 Baigell, Matthew 6, 45–46 The Balcony (The Movies) 12, 150 Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland 150 Baptistry of St. John’s 12, 25 Barber Shop 12–13, 90, 123, 124, 150 Barn at Essex 11 Barnes, George 28 Barr, Alfred Hamilton, Jr. 13, 67, 75 Barter, Judith 32, 35, 36, 62–63, 70–71, 106, 141 The Battery, Charleston, S.C. 11 25, 77 Bayles, Martha 131, 133 Beam Trawler, the Seal 37, 52 Bedard, Michael 96 Bedell, Ralph 119

181

Bedroom 10 Bell Tower 52 Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, Las Vegas, Nevada 85 Bellows, Emma 36 Bellows, George 12, 13, 15, 36, 39, 44, 47, 55, 75, 82, 93, 112, 120, 147–148, 149 Benton, Thomas Hart 6–7, 18 La Berge 148 Berkow, Ita 46, 132 Berman, Avis 9, 29, 33, 45, 48, 75, 91, 91–92, 92–93, 143 Bernstein, Theresa 52 Besson, Philippe 96 Biddle, Flora Miller 142 Bierstadt, Albert 86 Bill Latham’s House 13–14 Le Bistro (The Wine Shop) 14 Blackhead, Monhegan 14 Blackwell’s Island (1911) 14 –15, 40, 49, 90 Blackwell’s Island (1928) 15, 40, 90 Blake, Evan J. 96 Blanchard, Elizabeth Cameron (Bee) 15, 112 Blynman Bridge 15, 52 Bochner, Paul 64–65 Bonnefoy, Yves 31, 128 The Bootleggers 15–16, 83 Boston Transcript 55 Botton, Alain de 29, 32 Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon 16 Box Factory, Gloucester 11, 53 Boyd, William 100 Braddock, Allan 6 Brady, Eddie 356 Brady, Matthew 29, 127 Braff, Phyllis 63 Braque, Georges 67 Breton, André 133 Brettell, Richard 105 Breuning, Margaret 42 Brevard Art Center and Museum, Melbourne, Florida 119, 156 Briar Neck, Gloucester 52 Bridge in Paris 16–17 Bridle Path 16, 17, 90

Index British Museum 43, 94 Brooklyn Daily Eagle 37, 83 Brooklyn Museum 9, 16, 37, 52, 60, 68–69, 70, 83, 88, 139, 149 Brooklyn Society of Etchers, New York City 108, 148 Brown, Milton W. 18, 34 Brown-Robertson Galleries, New York City 149 Bruce, Patrick Henry 14, 17, 93, 102 Buffalo Evening News 18 Bukamura Museum of Art, Tokyo 157 The Bull Fight 17–18, 148 Burchfield, Charles 9, 18, 39, 115, 116, 123, 134, 139, 150, 151 Burly Cobb Hen Coop and Barn 19 Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro 18–19 Burrey, Suzanne 9 Cabin, Charleston, S.C. 25 California 19, 61, 63, 85, 119, 141, 153, 156 California Hills 19, 153 Callahan, Harry 104 The Camel’s Hump 19, 77, 116 Canaday, John 19–20, 84, 88, 99, 154 Canal Lock at Charenton 70 Cape Ann Granite 49, 53 Cape Ann Pasture 53 Cape Cod Afternoon 20, 77, 151 Cape Cod Bay 20–21, 140 Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts 21, 33 Cape Cod Evening 21, 84, 123 Cape Cod Morning 21, 77 Cape Cod Sunset 21–22 Cape Elizabeth, Maine 13, 23, 30, 77, 78, 79, 81–82, 106, 113 Captain Kelly’s House 22, 34, 110 Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head 22–23, 79, 82, 106 Captain Upton’s House 23, 49, 79, 82, 85 caricature 9–10, 23, 139, 149 Carnegie Museum of Art 20, 79, 113, 114, 119, 150, 151, 155 Cars and Rocks 11, 23–24, 82 Cassatt, Mary 39, 56 The Cat Boat 24 Century Association, New York City 74 Cézanne, Paul 70, 75, 102, 114, 116, 117 Chair Car 24 –25, 61, 110 Charleston, South Carolina 6, 10–11, 12, 25, 47–48, 77, 126, 150, 157 Charleston Doorway 25 Charleston Slum 25, 25–26 Chase, William Merritt 17, 26, 93, 135 Chase School of Art 26

182 Chatterton, Clarence K. 26, 93 Chaw, Walter 86 Cheruy, Jeanne 137 Chez Hopper 60 Chicago Society of Etchers 40 Chirico, Giorgio de 35, 36, 39, 56, 133, 78 Chop Suey 26–27, 90, 100, 150 Christian Science Monitor 101 Christie’s 25, 26, 45, 66, 89, 107 Church in Eastham 27 Church in Nyack 98 Church of San Esteban 27, 87 Church of the Ascension, New York City 36 Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio 350 The Circle Theatre 28, 90, 151 Circus Wagon 11, 53, 110 The City 28, 90 City Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri 154, 155 City Roofs 28–29, 90 City Sunlight 29, 77, 90 Civil War, American 25, 47, 77– 78, 82, 127 Civil War Campground 29, 77, 82 Clancy, John C. 29–30, 30, 112 Clark, John 136 Clark, Stephen Carlton 30, 65, 132, 150; Museum of Art, Ohio 149, 150 Cliffs Near Mitla, Oaxaca 87 Coast Guard Station 1927 30, 82 Coast Guard Station 1929 30– 31, 64, 82 Coates, Robert M. 56 Cobb, Burleigh, A. B. 18, 31, 114, 126, 150 Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses (oil) 18, 31 Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses (watercolor) 19 Cobb’s Barns, South Truro 18 Cohen, David 94 Cole, Thomas 137 Colleary, Elizabeth Thompson 60, 73, 119 Comey, Janet 24, 30–31, 66, 78, 79, 87, 103, 106 Compartment C, Car 293 32 La Concierge 23 The Conductor 110 Conference at Night 32–33, 90, 92, 100 Conlon, James 13 Construction, Saltillo 87 Cook, Greg 80 Coppel, Stephen 43–44, 94 Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 20, 149, 150, 151 Cork, Richard 17 Corn Hill, Truro 33 Cornell, Joseph 148 Cortissoz, Royal 83

Cottages at North Truro 110 Cotter, Holland 16–17, 121–122, 76, 102 Couple Drinking 23 Courbet, Gustave 117 Cove at Ogunquit 38, 82 Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York City 68, 157 Creek at Hogencamps 98 Crossing at Eastham 110 cubism 47, 67, 75 Cudlin, Jeffrey 121 Culvert at Orangetown 98 Cumming, Laura 93 cummings, e.e. 138 Cunard Sailor 23 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire 16, 153, 155 Curry, John Steuart 6, 18, 86 Custom House, Portland 33–34, 82 D. & R.G. Locomotive 15, 34, 110, 120, 149 Dandy Seated at Café Table 23 D’Arcy, David 36 Dauphinée, Constance 22, 34 Dauphinée, Henry 22, 34 Dauphinée House 22, 34 –35, 105, 110 Davies, Arthur B. 39, 42 Davis, Elliot Bostwick 50, 86, 109, 130 Davis, Mattie 35 Davis, Stuart 20, 52 Davis House 35, 53, 67 Dawn in Pennsylvania 35–36, 110, 123 Day after the Funeral 13, 36, 149 Dayton Art Institute 56 Dead Trees 52 Deck of Beam Trawler 36–37, 52 Degas, Edgar 37, 70, 91, 92–93, 94, 102, 110, 117, 130, 123 de Kooning, Elaine 111 de Kooning, Willem 20, 85, 111 Demarest, Robert J. 58 Dempsey, Patricia 66 Deserted House on the Mountain 98 Destroyer and Rocky Shore 52 Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan 152, 155 Les Deux Pigeons 37 Dicum, Gregory 19, 33, 90 Diebenkorn, Richard 85, 102 Dietrich, Daniel W. II 112 Doig, Peter 130 Don’t Bother to Knock (Film) 61 Don’t Come Knocking (Film) 89, 141 Dorfman, John 18 Dories in a Cove 82 The Dories, Ogunquit 37–38, 82

183 Dos Passos, John 38, 73, 138 Dos Passos, Katy 73, 116 Doss, Erika 89 Drug Store 38, 49, 90 du Bois, Guy Pène 5, 6, 38–39, 57, 74, 83, 93, 111, 131, 136, 143, 147–148, 148, 149, 153 Duchamp, Marcel 9, 117 Durand, Asher B. 314 Dybek, Stuart 96 Eakins, Thomas 7, 18, 39, 56, 97, 110, 127–128, 138 Early Sunday Morning 39, 49, 90, 98, 143, 150 East River 40, 90 East Side Interior 40 East Wind Over Weehawken 40–41 Eastern Point Light 40, 52, 79, 139 Ebsworth, Barney 27 Edward Hopper Boxing with Wallace Tremper 23 Edward Hopper House Art Center 41–42, 129, 156, 157 Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation 41–42 Eggleston, William 104 Ehrman, Edith K. 26 The Eight 10, 42, 115–116, 124, 142, 153 Eisenstein, Sergei 149 El Greco 120 The El Station 9, 42, 70, 90, 110 Eleven A.M. 42–43, 90 Eliot, Alexander 39 Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper, the Artist’s Mother 43, 58 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 43 The End of Violence (film) 140– 141 Evans, Walker 44, 104 Evening, the Seine 44 Evening Wind 43–44, 44 –45, 76 Evergood, Philip 111 Ewell, Leroy S. 103 Excursion into Philosophy 45, 84, 100, 130 Factory and Shed 53 Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine 55, 84, 88, 155, 157 Ferry Slip 90 Field, Kathy 21, 70 First Baptist Church, Nyack, New York 59, 61, 119 First Row Orchestra 46, 90 Fischer, Lucy 61 Fish, Prudence Paine 54 Five A. M. 45–46, 79 Flexner, James Thomas 47, 121 Folly Beach 11, 25, 47–48 Fondation de l’Hermitage, Lausanne, Switzerland 157

Fondazione Roma Museo, Rome 157 Forbes, Malcolm 63 Force, Juliana 48, 142, 143 Foreshore —Two Lights 82 The Forked Road 110 Fort and Gun 11, 25, 77 Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas 156 Foster, Carter 88 Four Lane Road 48 Fraenkel, Jeffrey 104 Frank, Peter 109 Frank, Robert 104 Frankenthaler, Helen 85 Frederick Keppel & Co. 45, 105, 144 Freight Car at Truro 110 Freight Cars, Gloucester 48–49, 53, 110, 116 French, Philip 12 French Six-Day Rider 49 Friedlander, Lee 104 From Williamsburg Bridge 49, 90 Frost, Robert 49–50, 110 Fruit Market Gallery, Edinburgh 156 Fryd, Vivien Green 45, 51, 73, 82–83, 87–88, 97, 130 Fukushima Prefectural Museum, Japan 157 Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain 156 Gagosian Gallery, New York City 157 Garret Henry Hopper, the Artist’s Father 59 Garver, Walter 88 Gas 50 Geldzahler, Henry 32 Gemünden, Gerd 28 Genauer, Emily 131 Georgia Museum of Art, Athens 156 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum 6 Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina 10, 12, 25–26, 157 Girl at a Sewing Machine 40, 50, 100, 138 Girlie Show 51, 90, 100 Glackens, William 42, 52, 72, 75, 124 Gloucester, Massachusetts 5, 7, 9, 15, 16, 24, 33, 35, 36, 44, 51, 52–53, 54, 57, 58, 65, 67, 68– 69, 72, 74, 79, 83, 85, 106, 107, 113, 128, 136, 139, 148 Gloucester Beach, Bass Rocks 52 Gloucester Factory and House 52 Gloucester Harbor 7, 51, 52, 148 Gloucester Houses 52 Gloucester Mansion 51–52, 52 Gloucester Roofs 53 Gloucester Street 53

Index Glueck, Grace 94 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 53, 98 Goodrich, Lloyd 7, 11–12, 19, 32, 37, 48, 50, 53–54, 58, 75, 76, 90–91, 124, 128, 129, 140, 142, 143, 149, 152 Goya, Francisco de 44 Great Depression 39, 40–41, 112 The Great God Arthur (status quo) 9, 23 El Greco 120 Green, Samuel 91 Greenberg, Clement 126 Greenwich Gallery, New York City 60 Greenwich Village 90, 122, 138, 142 La Grisette 23 Grooms, Red 96 Ground Swell 54 Group of Houses 52 The Guardian 120, 130 Gulack, Herman 60 Hankins, Evelyn 125 Harmonie Club, New York City 74, 147 Harry, Lou 62 Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, Massachusetts 150 Haskell, Howard 54–55 Haskell, Loring B. 54–55 Haskell’s House 13, 35, 52, 54 – 55, 68, 83, 112 Haunted House 55, 82 Hayes, Helen 81, 151; Hayward Gallery, London 156 Heffner, Maura 42 Helnwein, Gottfried 96 Hemingway, Ernest 17–18, 55 Henkes, Robert 28, 71, 121 Henri, Robert 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 26, 39, 42, 47, 52, 55, 56, 69–70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 82, 83, 91, 93, 102, 110, 121, 124, 129, 133, 135, 137, 147 Heyward, DuBose 25 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia 157 High Noon 56, 77, 130–131 Highland Light, North Truro 56–57, 79 Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine 82 Hills, South Truro 57 Hiroshima Museum, Japan 157 Hirsch, Joseph 111 Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York City 34, 61, 156 Hitchcock, Alfred 46, 57, 64, 66, 69, 89, 115, 148 Hobbs, Robert 6, 27, 40, 99, 108, 132, 133, 135 Hoboken, New Jersey 132 Hodgkin’s House 49, 53, 57–58 Hofmann, Hans 20

Index Hollander, John 24 Homer, Winslow 10–11, 18, 29, 47, 52, 58, 79, 83, 86, 110, 139–140, 142, 152 Hoppen, Andries 59 Hopper bequest 14, 22, 54, 74, 109, 156 Hopper, Charity Blauvelt 59 Hopper, Edward (art elements): abstract leanings 5, 24, 32, 34, 48–49, 62, 67, 73, 98, 99, 101–102, 108, 109, 114, 129, 131, 133; architecture 8, 9, 10, 21, 38, 40, 44, 51, 57–58 68–69, 75, 79, 103, 105, 107–108, 85, 86, 89, 95, 102, 114, 121, 122, 127, 130, 136, 144; chiaroscuro 45, 46, 78, 79, 94; cinematic effects 12, 16, 27–28, 46, 57, 86, 89, 92, 125, 140–141; color 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26–27, 30, 31–31, 34, 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 49, 51, 56, 58, 64, 66, 67, 70, 76, 77, 84, 89, 90, 91, 95, 101, 105, 107, 109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 128, 129, 132, 135, 137, 138; composition 9, 12, 16, 22, 25, 27, 32, 34, 36, 37, 40, 46, 51, 55, 56, 57, 62, 64, 67, 69, 70, 76, 81, 87, 91, 94, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 109, 111, 114, 118, 119, 129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 144; diagonals 7, 12, 15, 32, 37, 49, 62, 71, 74, 80, 85, 92–93, 94, 103, 105, 112, 113, 118–119, 129, 132; etching 6, 7, 12, 17, 20, 24, 34, 37, 40, 43, 43–44, 44– 45, 46, 50, 64, 66, 67–68, 70, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 90, 94, 98, 100, 105, 109, 124, 135, 140, 144–145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 155, 157; figures 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 21, 24, 27–28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45– 46, 49, 56, 57, 61–62, 63, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93–94, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 111, 117, 120– 121, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 141, 144, 157; film noir 16, 28, 32, 46, 61, 63, 92, 94, 125; geometric patterns 6, 19, 29, 30–31, 32, 47, 48, 67, 73, 75, 86, 98, 102, 114, 116, 118, 127, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 147; horizontals 7, 12, 20, 32, 34, 39, 40, 56, 57, 62, 82–83, 101–102, 105, 107, 109, 118–119, 132, 134; illustration 17, 38, 43, 45, 58, 69–70, 76, 89, 93, 98, 100, 101, 121, 124, 135, 147, 148, 149; impressionism 7, 8–9, 14, 17, 51, 70–71, 91, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107–108, 117, 137; light 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 14, 24, 25, 26–27,

184 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 50, 51, 56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 76–77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117, 118, 125, 126, 128, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 142, 143; oils 8–9, 14, 38, 39, 42, 48–49, 50, 51, 56, 62, 80– 81, 91–93, 95, 100–101, 108, 109, 117, 120–122, 125–126, 130–133, 134–135; realism 26, 39, 42, 47, 49, 55, 56, 105– 106, 110, 111; silence 32, 36, 44, 47, 83, 84, 85, 86, 99, 112, 115, 116, 120, 123, 125; style 7, 31– 32, 36, 43–44, 44, 48–49, 50, 56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 70–71, 72, 91, 100, 102–103, 105, 107–108, 109, 110, 110–111, 117, 124, 129, 137, 140, 141; verticals 12, 14, 15, 28, 29, 32, 40, 56, 62, 63, 85, 91, 101–102, 107, 109, 114, 118, 132; watercolor 5–6, 7, 15, 19, 22–23, 25–26, 34, 41, 47– 48, 51–53, 54–55, 58, 65–66, 83, 101, 107, 113, 117–119, 139, 142, 149 Hopper, Edward (art motifs): bridges 15, 16–17, 49, 81, 82– 83, 90, 105, 108, 137; houses 5, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 18–19, 22–23, 33, 35, 51–52, 54–55, 57–58, 63–68, 69–70, 72, 73, 83, 85, 115, 134; landscapes 14, 19, 31, 33, 47–48, 57, 88–89, 101–102, 112–113, 137, 142; lighthouses 22–23, 30–31, 41, 46–47, 56– 57, 65–66, 69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 103, 106, 128; nautical scenes 16, 24, 36–37, 37–38, 51, 54, 76, 80, 84–85, 87, 117, 134– 135, 144; nudes 42–43, 44–45, 51, 71, 87, 88, 97, 111, 130, 144; railroads 6, 9, 24–25, 32, 34, 35, 42, 48–49, 61–62, 64–65, 79, 92, 94, 108–109, 109–110, 135, 142; theaters 12, 28, 46, 51, 71–72, 91–92, 122–123, 125, 135–136; windows 5, 8, 11, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26–27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 39, 40, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 58, 61, 62–63, 72, 74, 78, 87, 88, 92, 95, 99, 114, 131, 132, 134, 136, 141, 144 Hopper, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith 58–59 Hopper, Garret Henry 24, 43, 58, 59, 97, 138 Hopper, Josephine Verstille Nivison 9–10, 11, 12, 18, 20– 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 27–28, 33, 38, 41, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52–53, 54, 55, 59–60, 61, 63, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73–74, 76, 81–82, 83–84, 88, 92, 95, 98, 100,

109, 111, 114, 114–115, 116, 120, 125, 126, 130, 132, 135–136, 137, 138, 139, 144, 148, 149, 154 Hopper, Marion 17, 20, 41, 58, 59, 60–61, 97–98, 119, 154 Hopperesque 8, 28, 29, 34–35, 61, 66, 86, 96, 98, 140, 141 Hotel by a Railroad 61–62 Hotel Lobby 62, 152 Hotel Room 62 Hotel Window 62–63, 85, 141 House Above a River 52 House and Boats 52, 68 House and Harbor 15, 52 House at Dusk 63, 90 House at Eastham 27, 63 House at Riverdale 53 House at San Mateo 63–64 House at Tarrytown 64 House at the Fort, Gloucester 52 House by an Inlet 64 House by Squam River 52 House by the Railroad 30, 35, 46, 53, 57, 61, 64 –65, 66, 69, 80, 83, 89, 110, 150 House by the Sea 52 House in Italian Quarter 13, 52, 55, 65, 68, 112 House in Provincetown 65 House Near a Dry Stream 120 House of the Foghorn I 66, 82 House of the Foghorn II 66, 82 House of the Foghorn III 65– 66, 82 House on a Hill (The Bugg y) 66 House on Dune Edge 66–67 House on Middle Street, Gloucester 53, 67 House on Pamet River 67 House on the Shore 52 House Tops 44, 67–68, 90, 110 House with a Bay Window 52, 68 House with a Rain Barrel 68, 89 House with Big Pine 27, 68 House with Fence 52 House with Veranda, Charleston, S.C. 11, 25 Houses of Squam Light 52, 69 Houses on the Beach, Gloucester 52 Hughes, Robert 48, 56, 84–85, 103 Huntington Hartford Foundation 19, 141, 153 Huntington Library, San Marino, California 85 Ibsen, Henrik 149 Indian Fine Arts and Crafts Society, New Delhi 153 Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana 157 Interior 71 Interior courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris 71 Intermission 71–72 Italian Quarter 15, 52, 72

185 Italian Quarter, Gloucester 52, 72 Iversen, Margaret 57, 126 Jamison, Judith 96 Jeffrey, Ian 44 Jenness, Harriet 73 Jenness, Kelly 73 Jenness House III 73 Jenness House IV 73 Jenness House Looking North 73 Jewell, Edward Alden 92 Jo in Wyoming 73 Jo Painting 73 Jo Sketching at Good Harbor Beach 53, 74 Jo Sketching in the Truro House 74 Jo Sleeping 53 Johnson, Eastman 86 Johnson, Lyndon 154 Junker, Patricia 93 Kandinsky, Wassily 9 The Kansas City Star 19 Katharine Kuh Gallery, Chicago 75 Keeler, Rolston 113 Kelly Jenness House 73 Kennedy, John F. 154 Kennedy, Maev 120 Kennedy Galleries, New York City 156, 157 Kent, Rockwell 74 –75, 93, 131, 138, 147–148 Key, Donald 91 The Killers (short story) 55 Kimball, Roger 5 Kipling, Rudyard 37 Knight, Christopher 85 Knowles, Maggie 55 Koob, Pamela 43, 56, 92, 133– 134 Kramer, Hilton 70, 103, 108, 102 Kranzfelder, Ivo 104 Krasner, Lee 111 Kreisberg, Louisa 119 Kroll, Leon 51, 52, 75, 82, 111 Krugier, Jan 36 Kuh, Katharine 10, 33, 37, 71, 75, 86–87, 101, 115, 188–119, 121, 126, 131 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo 111 Kunsthalle Wien, Wien, Austria 141 Kurlansky, Mark 107 LaGuardia, Fiorello 51 Landscape with Rocks 52 Lant, Antonia 125 Larsen, Susan 125 Las Vegas Art Museum, Nevada 85 Latham, William W. 13–14 Lawson, Ernest 42, 75 ledger book 12, 28, 33, 54, 76, 84, 98, 132, 143

Lee Shore 76, 98 Leider, Philip 137 Letourner, Alfred 49 Levin, Gail 11, 60, 81, 116, 117, 120, 143 Lewis, Emory 5 Lewis, Martin 43 Lewis, Meredith 136–137 Libby House, Portland 82 Lichtenstein, Roy 85 Lie, Jonas 113 Liesbrock, Heinz 70, 114 Light at Two Lights 77 Light Battery at Gettysburg 77– 78 The Lighthouse at Two Lights 46, 64, 77, 78, 79, 82, 153 Lighthouse Hill 49, 78–79, 82 The Lighthouse (Maine Coast) 79 Lighthouse Village 79 The Lily Apartments 90 Lime Rock Railroad 82, 110 Little, Carl 5, 16, 37, 39, 50, 51, 67, 72, 79, 87, 115, 128 The Locomotive 79, 110 Locomotive and Freight Car 110, 120 Loercher, Diana 80, 134 Logan Prize 81, 40, 149, 152 The Lonely House 44, 80 The Long Leg 79, 80 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California 85, 149 Los Angeles Times 85 Loucheim, Aline 110 Louis Newman Galleries, Beverly Hills, California 156 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark 156 The Louvre 50, 70, 80, 103, 105, 147, 148 Le Louvre et la Seine 70 The Louvre in a Thunderstorm 80 Lucas, Scott 71, 138 Luks, George 10, 39, 42, 72, 75, 112, 115–116, 124 Lyons, Deborah 31 M (film) 61 MacArthur, Charles 80–81, 151 The MacArthur’s Home “Pretty Penny” 80–81, 98, 151 Macbeth Gallery, New York City 42, 141–142 MacDowell Club, New York City 75, 87, 91, 148 Mack, Angela D. 10–11, 25, 126 Macomb’s Damn Bridge 40, 81, 90, 153 Maine 6, 13–14, 16, 22–23, 23– 24, 26, 29, 30–31, 33, 33–34, 37–38, 52, 55, 60, 65–66, 77, 78–79, 81–82, 84, 87, 88, 100, 103, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 134, 143, 148, 155, 156 Malick, Terrence 89

Index Man Seated on Bed 10 Manchester, Emily 24 Manet, Édouard 39, 70, 102, 110 Manhattan Bridge (1925) 90 Manhattan Bridge (1925 or 1926) 90 Manhattan Bridge Entrance 90 Manhattan Bridge Loop 49, 81, 90 Manion, Mary 89 Mann, James 85 The Mansard Roof 9, 35, 37, 52, 60, 68, 70, 83, 149 Mansart, François 83 Marden, Brice 34 Marling, Karal Ann 39 Marsh, Reginald 112, 122–123 Marshall’s House 84 The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet 84 –85 Martin, Steve 23, 63, 85, 89, 96 Marty Welch’s House 53, 85 Matisse, Henri 60 Matt, Gerald 141–142 McKeen, Martha and Reggie 84 McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas 156 Mealtime 23 Mecklenburg, Virginia M. 10, 14, 15, 16, 22–23, 27, 30, 33, 34, 35, 41, 47–48, 55, 57, 63, 65, 65–66, 68, 72, 73, 77, 85, 86, 89, 107, 113, 117, 118, 123, 134 Mellow, James 14–15, 61–62 Melville, Herman 76 Mendes, Sam 56, 86 Meryon, Charles 37, 44, 86 Methodist Church Tower 65, 86 Metropolitan Museum of Art 30, 100, 143, 150 Mexico 27, 58, 75, 86–87, 98, 101, 118–119, 152, 153 Meyerowitz, Joel 104 Meyerowitz, William 52 Millard, Charles W. 62, 72, 101– 102, 103, 129, 134–135, 137 Miller, Kenneth Hayes 74, 93 The Million Dollar Hotel (film) 141 Milwaukee Art Center, Wisconsin 156 Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina 71, 102–103, 138, 157 Mondrian, Piet 101–102 Monet, Claude 8–9, 109 The Monhegan Boat 82, 87, 148 Monhegan Lighthouse 79 Monterrey Cathedral 87 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama 77, 157 Montross Gallery, New York City 112–113 Moonlight Interior 87–88 Moran, Thomas 89 Morning in a City 88, 90, 141 Morning Sun 77, 88, 90, 100 Morse, John 8, 29

Index Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno, Wales 156 Motherwell, Robert 20, 111 Mount Moran 73, 88–89 Mountains at Guanajuato (Mexico) 87 Mouth of Pamet River — Full Tide 68, 89 moviegoing 12, 46, 83, 89, 92, 94, 122–123, 125, 149 Mrs. Acorn’s Parlor 82 Mrs. Kit Hopper’s One-Man Jury Show 20 Mrs. Scott’s House 89–90, 151 Müller, Robert 141 Mumford, Lewis 44 Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York 116, 153 Musée Cantini, Marseilles 14, 44, 156 Musée d’Art Américain, Giverny, France 157 Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris 151 Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany 157 Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany 157 Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence 155 Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, Florida 156 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 8, 51, 57, 68, 80, 85, 94, 112, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157 Museum of Modern Art 5, 13, 19, 22, 30, 36, 44, 50, 57–58, 59, 65, 67, 92, 96, 111, 116, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152, 155 Museum of Modern Art, Ibaraki, Japan 157 My Roof 90 National Academy of Design, New York City 87, 150 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 79, 85, 157 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 156 National Museum of American Art, Washington, D. C. 157 Negro Cabin 25 Nemerov, Alexander 54 Nevada Museum of Art, Reno 102, 157 New England fishing industry 16, 36–37, 52–53, 65, 72, 81–82, 106–107 New England House 52 New York City 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 19, 28, 40, 42, 43, 46, 48, 53, 60, 61, 70, 74, 75, 83, 88, 90– 91, 92, 95, 99, 110, 111, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130, 138, 142, 143, 144, 148

186 New York Corner (Corner Saloon) 70, 90, 91, 148 New York Evening Post 59 New York Herald Tribune 95, 131, 139 New York Interior 90, 91, 100, 149 New York Movie 28, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91–92, 100, 133, 151 New York, New Haven and Hartford 92, 110 New York Office 90, 92, 154 New York Pavements 90, 92–93 New York Restaurant 90, 91, 93, 100, 149 New York School of Art 10, 13, 17, 26, 31, 38, 39, 56, 59, 73, 69, 74, 83, 90, 93–94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 110, 121, 124, 129, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139 New York School of Illustrating 69, 90, 147 The New York Times 14, 16, 19– 20, 22, 26, 33, 49, 55, 58, 70, 88, 90, 92, 94, 99, 102, 108, 112, 113, 236, 124, 143 New York University, New York City 125, 138–139, 152 Newman, Barnett 111 Newport Harbor Art Museum, Newport Beach, California 156 Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Wales 156 Night in the Park 76–77, 90, 94 Night on the El Train 90, 94, 110 Night Shadows 44, 61, 76, 90, 94 –95 Night Windows 49, 61, 90, 95, 115, 150, 151 Nighthawks 32, 35, 55, 62, 85, 89, 90, 92, 95–96, 100, 140– 141, 152 North Truro Station 110 Notes on Painting 13, 96–97 Novak, Barbara 98 November, Washington Square 90, 97 Nude Crawling into Bed 97 Nyack, New York 10, 20–21, 24, 34, 41, 58, 59, 60–61, 64, 74, 80–81, 97–98, 102, 105, 109, 117, 119, 122, 128, 129, 147, 148, 154, 156, 157 Oak Hill Cemetery, Nyack, New York 98, 154 Oates, Joyce Carol 96 The Observer 12 O’Connor, John 20 October on Cape Cod 98 O’Doherty, Brian 6–7, 9, 17, 24, 26, 39, 50, 53, 70, 72, 84, 86, 98–99, 114, 123, 127, 131, 138, 154 O’Donnell, Rosie 81 Office at Night 28, 61–62, 90, 99, 100, 152

Office in a Small City 57, 99– 100 Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine 112 O’Hare, Mary Kate 123 O’Keeffe, Georgia 59, 85, 86 Old Church on New City Road 98 Old Saw Mill at Clarkstown 98 Open Window 148 Outhouses 52 Padiglione D’Arte Contemporanea, Milan 156 El Palacio 87, 101 Palazzo Reale, Milan 157 Paleis Voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels 157 Palms at Saltillo 87, 101 Le Parc de Saint-Cloud 70, 101–102 Paris, France 8–9, 14, 16–17, 23, 31, 70–71, 80, 101–102, 102, 102–103, 105, 107–108, 125, 129, 137, 138, 147–148 Paris Street 102–103 Parisian Woman Dressed in Green 23 Parisian Workman 23 Parkhurst’s House 52 Parks, John A. 37 Le Pavillon de Flore 70, 83, 103 Pavillon de Flore in the Spring 103 Pece, Marco 96 Pemaquid Light 79, 82, 103 La Penitente 15, 120 Pennies from Heaven (film) 85, 89, 96 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 7, 8, 15, 39, 56, 73, 90, 149, 151, 155 Pennsylvania Coal Town 103– 104 People in the Park 90 People in the Sun 77, 104 Perlman, Bennard 96 Peter Findlay Gallery, New York City 157 Philadelphia Museum of Art 86, 144–145, 154, 155, 157 Phillips, Duncan 132, 149 Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona 156 photography 29, 44, 92–93, 104, 124, 126, 127, 157 Picasso, Pablo 59, 85, 117, 143 Pindelski, Thomas 104 The Pine Tree 109 Pink House with Stone Wall 120 Pissarro, Camille 14 Les Poilus (Somewhere in France) 44, 104 –105, 148 Polk Public Museum, Lakeland, Florida 156 Pollock, Jackson 111 Polonsky, Abraham 28 Le Pont des Arts 105 Le Pont Royal 83, 103, 105, 108 Poor, Henry Varnum 105–106

187 Poplars 120, 149 Porg y (play) 25 Porter, Fairfield 102 Portland Head Light (Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine) 79, 106 Portrait of Jo 12, 150 Portrait of Orleans 106 Portrait of Walter Tittle (The Illustrator) 135 Portuguese Church 52, 65, 106– 107, 120 Portuguese Quarter 15, 52 Pousette-Dart, Nathaniel 135 Preston, Stuart 19, 49–50, 110 Prospect Street, Gloucester 11, 107, 131 Prout’s Neck, Maine 81–82 Provincetown, Massachusetts 21, 33, 65, 86, 115, 127 Psycho (film) 46, 57, 61, 64, 66, 69, 89 Le Quai des Grands Augustins 107–108 Le Quai des Grands Augustins with Trees 107 Queensborough Bridge 15, 81, 149, 231–232 Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane 156 The Race 98, 139 The Railroad 108 Railroad Crossing (etching) 110 Railroad Crossing (oil) 108–109 110 Railroad Crossing, Rockland Maine 110 Railroad Embankment 110 Railroad Gates 48, 53, 110 Railroad Sunset 64, 109, 110 Railroad Train 109 Railroad Trestle in the Desert 110, 120 Railroad Warning 110 Ranch House, Santa Fe 120, 149 Rath Museum, Geneva, Switzerland 156 Ray, Nicolas 130 Read, Helen Appleton 37, 67, 74–75, 83 Reality: A Journal of Artist’s Opinions 5, 105–106, 110–111, 153 Rear Window (film) 57 Reclining Nude 111 Reece, Childe 79 Rehn, Frank K. M. 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 29–30, 30, 32, 38, 45, 49, 51, 52, 55, 64, 69, 78, 80– 81, 105, 111–112, 114, 116, 121, 124, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155 Rembrandt van Rijn 37, 44, 80 Renner, Rolf 14, 63, 80, 92, 108, 108, 115, 122

Renoir, Pierre Auguste 14 Reverse Angle (film) 141 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 72 Rimbaud, Arthur 125 Road and Trees 112, 154 Road in Maine 82, 148, 112–113 Road to Perdition (film) 28, 85 Roberts, Ellen 21, 77, 114, 115, 116, 127 Roberts, Jennifer 79, 94 Robinson, Edward G. 131 Roche, Henri-Pierre 17 Rockland, Maine 16, 29, 52, 55, 81–82, 88, 109, 110, 134, 155, 157 Rocks and House 52 Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit 82 Rocks at the Fort, Gloucester 52, 113 Rockwell, Norman 66, 85 Rocky Pedestal 174, 228, 242– 243, 343 Rocky Shore and Water 52 Rodin, Auguste 142 Roofs of the Cobb Barn 19, 113– 114 Roofs, Saltillo 87 Roofs, Washington Square 90, 114 Rooftops 90 Rooftops of Ferry Slip 90 Room in Brooklyn 90, 114, 150 Room in New York 61, 84, 90, 100, 114 –115, 123 Rooms by the Sea 115, 127, 133 Rooms for Tourists 65, 115 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 11, 40–41, 103, 135 Root, Edward Wales 115–116, 124, 150 Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts 53 Ross, Bruce 7, 39 Ross, Herbert 89, 96 Rothko, Mark 111 Rothstein, Barbarie 64 Route 6, Eastham 27, 116 Rowboat in Rocky Cove 98, 100 Rubenfeld, Richard L. 8 Rubin, Kate 127 Ryder’s House 116 Saarinen, Aline 76 Safran, Rose 38 Saies, Enid Marion 116–117 Sail Boat with Figures 52 Sailboat 117 Sailing 9, 100, 117, 139, 148 St. Botolph Club, Boston 149, 154 St. Francis’ Towers 118, 120, 149 Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe 117–118, 120 Saltillo Mansion 87, 118 Saltillo Rooftops 87, 118–119 Sanborn, Arthayer Russell, Jr. 41–42, 61, 98, 109, 119

Index San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 156 San Jose Museum of Art, California 156 Santa Fe, New Mexico 6, 9, 15, 34, 71, 117–118, 119–120, 149, 153 São Paulo 9, exhibition 53–54 Sargent, John Singer 15, 74, 59, 140 Sargent De Ville 23 Scherer, Barrymore Laurence 68 Schjeldahl, Peter 34–35, 61, 99 Schmied, Wieland 62 Scribner’s Magazine 16, 55 Sea at Ogunquit 38, 82, 148 Sea Watchers 84, 120 Seated Carriage Driver 23 Seattle Art Museum, Washington 156, 157 Second Story Sunlight 77, 120– 121 Segal, George 96 Seitz, William C. 53 Self-Portrait (c. 1910) 121, 139 Self-Portrait (1925–30) 121–122 Seurat, Georges 85 Seven A.M. 27, 98, 122 Severens, Martha 12 Shacks at Lanesville 52, 65 Shadow of a Doubt (film) 61, 115 Shahn, Ben 111 Shakespeare at Dusk 90, 122 Shattuck, Kathryn 99 Shea, Pete 124 Sheeler, Charles 47, 86, 151 Sherburne, E. C. 57–58 The Sheridan Theatre 90, 122– 123 Shinn, Everett 42, 153 Shirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany 157 Shore, Stephen 104 Shore at Upper Nyack 98 Sierra Madre at Monterrey 87 Silberman, Robert 28, 122 Sinatra, Barbara 136 Sisley, Alfred 14 Skylights 90 Skyline Near Washington Square 80, 90, 116, 123–124, 149 Sloan, John 7, 10, 12, 39, 40, 42, 44, 52, 86, 93, 95, 113, 119– 120, 122–123, 124, 147, 150 Slopes of Grand Teton 73 Small Town on Cove 52 Small Town Station 110 Smash the Hun 70, 124 –125, 148 Smith, John DeWint 41, 97 Smith, Roberta 23, 34, 98, 136, 143 Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts 151 Snyder, Robert W. 10 Soby, James Thrall 31–32

Index Soir Bleu 7, 70, 82, 91, 125, 148 Solitary Figure in a Theater 89, 90, 125 Solitude #56 125–126 Sotheby’s, New York 35, 63, 127 Souter, Jerry 6, 34, 74, 104, 120, 121, 127, 135, 136 South Carolina Morning (Carolina Morning) 77, 126 South Truro Church 127 Southwest Art 85 Soyer, Raphael 111, 127–128, 154 Spanish-American War 147 Spaulding, John T. 29, 51, 112 Squam Light 7, 52, 69, 79, 128, 148 Square Rock, Ogunquit 82 Städtische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf 156 Stairway 98, 128 Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris 129, 138 Stebbins, Theodore 18, 144 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 156 Stein, Gertrude 17 Stein, Leo 17 Stein, Susan Alyson 95 Strand, Mark 22, 57, 110, 128 Strangers on a Train (film) 61 Street Corner 52 Street Scene with Pedestrians 90 Strout, Joshua 22–23 Sultry Day 53 Summer Evening 84, 98, 129– 130 Summer in the City 84, 90, 130, 152 Summer Interior 70, 130 Summertime 90, 92, 100, 130– 131 Sun in an Empty Room 5, 50, 53, 77, 131 Sun on Prospect Street 61, 107, 131 Sunday 100, 131–132, 133, 149 Sunlight in a Cafeteria 77, 90, 132 Sunlight on Brownstones 49, 77, 90, 132–133 surrealism 35, 36, 56, 78, 102, 104, 106, 115, 126, 133 symbolism 35, 121, 133–134 Tables for Ladies 90, 100, 134, 150 Taggart, John 144 Talbot’s House 69, 82, 83, 134 Tall Masts 52, 134 –135 Tarrytown, New York 64, 74, 97 Tate Gallery, London 152 Taylor, Joseph Russell 36 Terra Foundation for American Art 35 Theisen, Gordon 11, 55, 95–96 They Live by Night (film) 130

188 Time (magazine) 9, 40, 62, 129, 152, 153 Tittle, Walter 44, 74, 93, 135, 138 Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum 156 Toward Boston 110 Train and Bathers 110 135 Trawler 52 Trawler in Dock 52 Trees, East Gloucester 52 Trees in Sunlight, Parc de SaintCloud 70 Triangle Shirtwaist Co. fire 40, 50 Troyen, Carol 7, 15, 38, 41, 44, 48, 69, 116, 122, 130, 132, 133, 139 Truro and South Truro, Cape Cod 18, 19, 20–22, 27, 31, 33, 34, 54, 56–57, 59, 60, 63, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 80, 89, 98, 106, 112, 115, 116, 120, 126–127, 131, 144, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154 Truro Station Coal Box 110 Tushnet, Eve 109 Two Comedians 125, 135–136, 154 Two on the Aisle 82, 90, 136 Two Puritans 112, 136 Two Trawlers 52 Tyler, Parker 32 Tyler Museum of Art, Texas 102, 157 Universalist Church, Gloucester 35, 52, 136–137 Universalist Meeting House, Gloucester, Massachusetts 35 Updike, John 8 Upton, Joseph H. 23 Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City 156 Utica Art Society, Utica, New York 150 Valley of the Seine 137 Vanity Fair (magazine) 140 Van Riper, Frank 104 Van Sicklen, Bill 8 Vassar College 26, 75 Verlaine, Paul 125, 137 Vermeer, Jan 50, 137–138 Vertigo (film) 57 Viatte, Germain 14, 44 Victorian House 52 Vietor, Thomas F. 9 View Across Interior Courtyard at 48 rue de Lille, Paris 138 View of Hudson River from Franklin Street 98 Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut 22, 150, 153, 155 Wagstaff, Sheena 37

Waits, Tom 96 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 152 Walter Tittle Drawing 135 Wanamaker Gallery, New York City 148 Ward, Joseph Anthony 44, 131 Warkel, Harriet 62 Washington Post 104 Washington Square North 28, 29, 38, 40, 49, 60, 64, 74, 84, 87, 90, 97, 98, 100, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123–124, 128, 131, 132, 134, 135, 138–139, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154 Watson, Forbes 31, 78–79, 140 Webster, Ambrose E. 113 Weegee (Arthur Fellig) 126 Welch, Martin Leander 85 Wells, Walter 40, 66 Wenders, Wim 89, 140–141 Western Motel 11, 100, 141–142, 153 Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, West Germany 156 Weyhe Gallery, New York City 144 White House with Dormer Window 52 White River at Sharon 142 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt 38, 48, 142–143 Whitney Museum of American Art 5, 14, 19, 20, 39, 42, 48, 53, 60, 70, 74, 77, 85, 102, 108, 109, 117, 125, 126, 140, 142, 142–143, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157 Whitney Studio Club 38, 48, 108, 142, 143–144, 148, 149, 155 Wichita Art Museum 5–6, 32– 33, 46–47, 152 Wilkie, Wendell 11 Wisotzki, Paula 35 Wolff, Theodore F. 102 A Woman in the Sun 144, 77, 100 Wood, Gaby 59–60 Wood, Grant 6, 18 Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts 17, 24, 144, 155 World War II 18, 35, 54, 86 Wright, Frank Lloyd 19, 141 Wright, Lloyd 19, 141 Yawl Riding a Swell 144 Yonkers 7 Zigrosser, Carl 44, 64, 66, 67, 105, 86, 109, 144 –145 Zimmer, William 142 Zone, Ray 86 Zurier, Rebecca W. 10