Edward Hopper
 Edward
Hopper, the best-known American realist of the inter-war period,
once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of
nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an
artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and
introspection important themes in his painting.
While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was
equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. In
both his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated
renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.
Hopper was born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building
center north of New York City, the only son of a comfortably
well-off, middle-class family. His parents, mostly of Dutch
ancestry, were Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant, and his
wife Elizabeth Griffiths Smith. Hopper was a good student in grade
school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He readily absorbed
his father’s intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian
culture and demonstrated his mother’s artistic lineage. In 1895,
Edward Hopper created his first signed oil painting,
Rowboat in
Rocky Cove, which demonstrated his early interest in nautical
subjects. In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent
himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely. Though a tall and quiet
teenager, his prankish sense of humor found outlet in his art,
sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in
comic situations. By 1899 he had already decided to become an
artist, but his parents persuaded him to begin by studying
commercial illustration because this seemed to offer a more secure
future. Edward Hopper first attended the New York School of
Illustrating, then in 1900 transferred to the New York School of
Art. It was here that Hopper studied with legendary teachers William
Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Kenneth Hayes Miller. |
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 Edward
Hopper would describe Robert Henri as 'the most influential
teacher I had', adding 'men didn't get much from Chase;
there were mostly women in the class.' Early on, Hopper
modeled his style after Chase and French masters
Édouard Manet
and Edgar
Degas. Sketching from live models proved a challenge and a
shock for the conservatively raised Hopper. Edward Hopper was a
slow developer in art, remaining at the School of Art for seven
years, eventually became a part time teacher there. Like the
majority of the young American artists of the time, Hopper
longed to study in France. With his parents' help he finally
left for Paris in October 1906. This was an exciting moment in
the history of the Modern movement, but Hopper was to claim that
its effect on him was minimal. Hopper visited Europe three times
between 1906 and 1910, and while he was a life-long Francophile,
he never went abroad again. For some time his painting was full
of reminiscences of what he had seen abroad. This tendency
culminates in Soir Bleu of 1914 (shown above), a
recollection of the Mi-Caréme carnival in Paris, and one of the
largest pictures Hopper ever painted. It failed to attract any
attention when he showed it in a mixed exhibition in the
following year, and it was this failure which threw him back to
working on the American subjects with which his reputation is
now associated. In 1913 he moved to Greenwich Village, renting
the top floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North. This would
be his home for the rest of his life. Until the age of 40,
Hopper’s career was marked by disappointment. He only sold one
painting, and was rarely able to get into gallery shows. Hopper
supported himself through commercial illustration, which he
loathed. Edward Hopper also had great success with printmaking,
which won him critical recognition. Hopper’s breakthrough came
in 1923 when the Brooklyn Museum bought his watercolor The
Mansard Roof for $100. The following year he married fellow
painter Josephine Nivison and began showing his work with
prominent New York art dealer Frank Rehn. Solo shows made
Hopper’s reputation: his oils and watercolors sold well, and
critics applauded his quiet realism, use of light, and above
all, his ability to reveal beauty in the most mundane subjects. |
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 Edward
Hopper's second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out.
The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his
first fully mature picture, The
House by the Railroad (shown above). With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this
is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently
incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also
full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of
quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance,
could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he
first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly
realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings
have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen,
a writer whom he admired."One of the themes of
The House by the Railroad is the loneliness of
travel, and the Hoppers now began to travel widely within the United States, as
well as going on trips to Mexico. Although Hopper continued to travel, his
best-known works came from his solitary wanderings in New York City.
These include Early Sunday Morning, which shows Greenwich
Village shop fronts before people filled the streets, and
Nighthawks (Shown top of page), an image of a diner late at
night. Hopper died at the age 84, and during his long career saw the
rise of many different avant-garde moments, including
Surrealism,
Abstract
Expressionism, and
Pop Art. Despite the popularity of these styles, he remained
esteemed by critics and the public. |
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