Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, a small shipbuilding town on the west bank of the Hudson River about twenty five miles north of Manhattan ^[1]. His parents, Garret Henry Hopper and Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper, were comfortable members of the town's Baptist middle class. His father ran a dry goods store, and the family home on North Broadway, where Edward grew up with his older sister Marion, still stands today as the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center ^[2].

The boy drew constantly. By age ten he was signing and dating his sketches, and the river traffic of Nyack gave him an early subject: sailboats, yachts, and the working vessels of the Hudson. He briefly considered a career in naval architecture, and boats and coastal scenes would recur in his painting for the rest of his life ^[1]. Tall for his age (he reached six feet by twelve and eventually stood well over six feet), Hopper was bookish, reserved, and self-contained, traits that stayed with him into adulthood ^[2].

After graduating from Nyack High School in 1899, he moved toward art with his parents' cautious blessing. They urged commercial illustration as a practical safeguard, so he first enrolled in a school for illustrators in New York before transferring around 1900 to the New York School of Art, founded by William Merritt Chase ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Edward Hopper before the fame finds the answer in these years: a quiet Hudson Valley teenager training himself, sketch by sketch, for a career that would take decades to arrive.

At the New York School of Art, Hopper studied under Robert Henri, the charismatic teacher associated with the urban realists later called the Ashcan School. Henri pushed his students to paint modern American life directly, an instruction Hopper absorbed even as he developed a cooler, more detached sensibility than his teacher's. His classmates included George Bellows, Guy Pène du Bois, and Rockwell Kent, a remarkable generation gathered in one studio ^[1].

Between 1906 and 1910 Hopper made three trips to Europe, spending most of his time in Paris. He painted the Seine, the bridges, and the quiet corners of the city, but he largely ignored the avant-garde ferment around him. Cubism, then remaking European painting, left almost no trace on his work. He later said the artists who mattered most to him were older ones, and the strong light and shadow of his Paris canvases already point toward his mature style ^[3].

Back in New York, recognition refused to come. Hopper supported himself for roughly two decades as a commercial illustrator, work he disliked and did only enough of to pay the bills. He sold one painting, Sailing, at the landmark 1913 Armory Show, then sold no other painting for about ten years ^[1]. During this dry stretch he turned to etching around 1915, and prints such as Evening Wind and Night Shadows earned him his first sustained critical notice in the early 1920s. The etchings worked out themes, lone figures, night streets, raking light through windows, that his paintings would soon make famous ^[3].

The turn came in 1923 and 1924. The Brooklyn Museum bought the watercolor The Mansard Roof in 1923 for one hundred dollars, and a 1924 show of his watercolors at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York sold out ^[1]. Hopper, then in his early forties, finally quit illustration and painted full time. Among the central Edward Hopper achievements of the following years was House by the Railroad (1925), a stark Victorian mansion isolated against the sky, which in 1930 became one of the first paintings to enter the collection of the new Museum of Modern Art ^[4].

Recognition accelerated through the Depression decade, a period when his sales held up while many artists struggled. The Museum of Modern Art gave him a retrospective in 1933, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, which would become the largest repository of his work, followed with its own retrospective in 1950 ^[5]. Canvases from these years, Early Sunday Morning (1930), Room in New York (1932), Gas (1940), fixed his repertoire: storefronts at dawn, solitary figures behind glass, filling stations at the edge of dark woods.

In January 1942, weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hopper completed Nighthawks, a scene of three customers and a counterman in a wedge-shaped all-night diner glowing against a deserted street. The Art Institute of Chicago purchased it within months of its completion, and it became probably the most reproduced image in American painting, endlessly quoted and parodied ^[6]. Late honors followed: election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the cover of Time magazine in 1956, and selection to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1952 ^[2].

In 1924 Hopper married Josephine Verstille Nivison, a painter and former Henri student he had known since art school. The marriage lasted until his death and was central to everything he made. Jo, as she was known, posed for virtually every female figure in his mature paintings, kept detailed ledger books recording each canvas as it was finished, and pushed his watercolors toward exhibition at a moment when his career had stalled ^[1].

The couple's life was famously austere. From 1913 until his death, Hopper lived and worked in a walk-up studio at 3 Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, hauling coal up the stairs well into old age ^[2]. Summers were spent painting in New England, first in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and later on Cape Cod, where in 1934 the Hoppers built a simple house and studio in South Truro that became the setting and source for many coastal pictures ^[5].

By most accounts, including Jo's own diaries, the marriage was combative and interdependent at once. The two argued, sometimes bitterly, over her subordinated career, yet they were rarely apart for more than a day in over four decades. Hopper himself was taciturn to the point of legend. Interviewers found him monosyllabic, and he preferred to let the pictures carry whatever meaning he had. He read widely, in French as well as English, and often cited a line from Goethe about rendering the world as it passed through an individual mind ^[3].

Hopper's output slowed after 1950, partly from age and health troubles, partly from his own exacting standards. He often completed only one or two oils a year, spending months on preparatory sketches before touching a large canvas. Yet several late paintings rank with his best, including Morning Sun (1952), Office in a Small City (1953), and Sun in an Empty Room (1963), works that pared his art down to light, wall, and window with almost nothing else remaining ^[3].

He lived long enough to watch Abstract Expressionism sweep American art and to find himself treated as a survivor of an older order. Hopper did not hide his distaste for pure abstraction, and in 1953 he joined other realist painters in supporting the journal Reality, which defended figurative art against the dominance of the New York School ^[1]. Critics who had once called him merely an illustrator increasingly read his stillness and geometry as something closer to the abstract painters than either camp admitted.

Edward Hopper died in his Washington Square studio on May 15, 1967, at the age of eighty four ^[7]. Josephine Hopper died ten months later, in March 1968. She bequeathed the couple's entire artistic estate, more than three thousand paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, an act that made the Whitney the permanent center of Hopper scholarship ^[5].

Few American painters have projected an influence so far beyond painting. Filmmakers borrowed his framing and lighting almost immediately: Alfred Hitchcock acknowledged that the mansion in Psycho drew on House by the Railroad, and directors from German filmmaker Wim Wenders to David Lynch have cited Hopper's night scenes and empty rooms as visual sources ^[6]. Photographers, novelists, and songwriters have returned again and again to his motifs of the diner, the motel, and the window at night.

Within art history his standing has only grown. Gail Levin's catalogue raisonné and her 1995 biography, built partly on Jo Hopper's diaries, deepened and complicated the record of his life and working method ^[3]. Major retrospectives at the Whitney, the Tate Modern in London, and the Grand Palais in Paris drew enormous crowds, and in 2018 his 1929 canvas Chop Suey sold at auction for 91.9 million dollars, at the time a record price for any pre-war American painting ^[8].

The essential Edward Hopper facts, a Nyack childhood, twenty lean years in illustration, late fame after 1924, roughly four decades of slow, deliberate mature work, explain little about why the paintings hold their grip. Any Edward Hopper biography eventually confronts the same puzzle he refused to explain: how pictures of ordinary walls, windows, and waiting people came to feel like the inner weather of modern life. Museums from the Whitney to the Art Institute of Chicago keep his major canvases on nearly permanent view, and the crowds in front of Nighthawks show no sign of thinning ^[6].