Edward Hopper

A pioneer in picturing the 20th-century American scene, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was a realist whose portrayal of his native country was uncompromising, yet filled with deep emotional content.

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, N.Y. At 17 he entered a New York school for illustrators; then from 1900 he studied for about 6 years at the New York School of Art, mostly under Robert Henri, whose emphasis on contemporary life strongly influenced him. Between 1906 and 1910 Hopper made three long visits to Europe, spent mostly in France but also including travel to other countries. In Paris he worked on his own, painting outdoor city scenes, and drawing Parisian types. After 1910 he never went abroad again.

Back home, from about 1908 Hopper began painting aspects of the native scene that few others attempted. In contrast to most former Henri students, he was interested less in the human element than in the physical features of the American city and country. But his pictures were too honest to be popular; they were rejected regularly by academic juries and failed to sell. Until he was over 40 he supported himself by commercial art and illustration, which he loathed; but he found time in summers to paint.

In 1915 Hopper took up etching, and in the 60-odd plates produced in the next 8 years, especially between 1919 and 1923, he first expressed in a mature style what he felt about the American scene. His prints presented everyday aspects of America with utter truthfulness, fresh direct vision, and an undertone of intense feeling. They were his first works to be admitted to the big exhibitions, to win prizes, and to attract attention from critics. With this recognition he began in the early 1920s to paint more and with a new assurance, at first in oil, then in watercolor. Thenceforth the two mediums were equally important in his work.

The 1920s brought great changes in Hopper's private life. In 1924 he married the painter Josephine Verstille Nivison, who had also studied under Henri. The couple spent winters in New York, on the top floor of an old house on Washington Square where Hopper had lived since 1913. He was now able to give up commercial work, and they could spend whole summers in New England, particularly on the seacoast. In 1930 they built a house in South Truro on Cape Cod, where they lived almost half the year thenceforth, with occasional long automobile trips, including several to the Far West and Mexico. Both of them preferred a life of the utmost simplicity and frugality, devoted to painting and country living.

Hopper's subject matter can be divided into three main categories: the city, the small town, and the country. His city scenes were concerned not with the busy life of streets and crowds, but with the city itself as a physical organism, a huge complex of steel, stone, concrete, and glass. When one or two women do appear, they seem to embody the loneliness of so many city dwellers. Often his city interiors at night are seen through windows, from the standpoint of an outside spectator. Light plays an essential role: sunlight and shadow on the city's massive structures, and the varied night lights—streetlamps, store windows, lighted interiors. This interplay of lights of differing colors and intensities turns familiar scenes into pictorial dramas.

Hopper's portrayal of the American small town showed a full awareness of what to others might seem its ugly aspects: the stark New England houses and churches, the pretentious flamboyance of late-19th-century mansions, the unpainted tenements of run-down sections. But there was no overt satire; rather, a deep emotional attachment to his native environment in all its ugliness, banality, and beauty. It was his world; he accepted it, and in a basically affirmative spirit, built his art out of it. It was this combination of love and revealing truth that gave his portrait of contemporary America its depth and intensity.

In his landscapes Hopper broke with the academic idyllicism that focused on unspoiled nature and ignored the works of man. Those prominent features of the American landscape, the railroad and the automobile highway, were essential elements in his works. He liked the relation between the forms of nature and of manmade things—the straight lines of railway tracks; the sharp angles of farm buildings; the clean, functional shapes of lighthouses. Instead of impressionist softness, he liked to picture the clear air, strong sunlight, and high cool skies of the Northeast. His landscapes have a crystalline clarity and often a poignant sense of solitude and stillness.

Hopper's art owed much to his command of design. His paintings were never merely naturalistic renderings but consciously composed works of art. His design had certain marked characteristics. It was built largely on straight lines; the overall structure was usually horizontal, but the horizontals were countered by strong verticals, creating his typical angularity. His style showed no softening with the years; indeed, his later oils were even more uncompromising in their rectilinear construction and reveal interesting parallels with geometric abstraction.

After his breakthrough in the 1920s, Hopper received many honors and awards, and increasing admiration from both traditionalists and the avant-garde. He died in his Washington Square studio on May 15, 1967.

Further Reading

Lloyd Goodrich, Edward Hopper (1971), is a fully illustrated biographical and critical study. Saõ Paulo 9 (1967), the catalog of the Biennial Exhibition held in Saõ Paulo, Brazil, that featured Hopper, contains essays on him by William C. Seitz and Goodrich. □

Hopper, Edward (1882–1967). American painter and etcher. He was born in Nyack in New York State and spent almost all his career in New York City, but he travelled extensively in the USA, making long journeys by car. After a year at a commercial art school he studied from 1900 to 1906 at the New York School of Art; his teachers included Chase and Henri and his fellow students included George Bellows and Rockwell Kent. Between 1906 and 1910 he made three trips to Europe (mainly Paris), but these had little influence on his style (he admired the Impressionists but took no interest in avant-garde art). In 1913 he exhibited (and sold) a picture at the Armory Show, but from then until 1923 he earned his living entirely by commercial illustration. Following a successful one-man show in 1924, however, he enjoyed a fairly rapid rise to recognition as the outstanding exponent of American Scene Painting (he was given a retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and this set the seal on his reputation).

Hopper's distinctive style was formed by the mid-1920s and thereafter changed little. The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting—his best-known work, Nighthawks (Art Institute of Chicago, 1942), showing an all-night diner, has an unusually large ‘cast’ with four. Typical settings are motel rooms, filling stations, cafeterias, and almost deserted offices at night. He was the first artist to seize on this specifically American visual world and make it definitively his own. However, although his work is rooted in a particular period and place, it also has a peculiarly timeless feel and deals in unchanging realities about the human condition. He never makes feelings explicit or tries to tell a story; rather he suggests weariness, frustration, and troubled isolation with a poignancy that rises above the specific. Hopper himself enjoyed solitude (although he was happily married to another ex-student of Henri's) and he disliked talking about his work. When he did, he discussed it mainly in terms of technical problems; one of his best-known pronouncements is that he wanted only to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house'. Of Nighthawks he said: ‘I didn't see it as particularly lonely … Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a big city.’ Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings he exerts a powerful psychological impact that makes him one of the great painters of modern life.

Hopper worked in watercolour as well as oil and also made etchings, beginning in 1915. In fact his individual vision emerged in printmaking before it did in painting—he later commented that ‘After I took up etching, my painting seemed to crystalise'. His best-known print is Evening Wind (1921), establishing a theme that would later often recur in his paintings—the female nude in a city interior. He virtually abandoned printmaking in 1923, but in spite of his short career in the medium he has been described as ‘undoubtedly the greatest American etcher of this century’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, American Prints 1879–1979, 1980).

Hopper was dismayed by the rise of Abstract Expressionism and in 1953 was one of a group of representational painters who launched the journal Reality as a mouthpiece for their views; in 1963 they protested to the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art about the ‘gobbledegook influences’ of abstract art in their collections. Nevertheless, Hopper's widow, who survived him by only a year, left his entire artistic estate—over 2,000 works—to the Whitney.

Hopper, Edward (b Nyack, NY, 22 July 1882; d New York, 15 May 1967). American painter and etcher. He spent almost all his career in New York, but he travelled extensively in the USA, making long journeys by car. His main training was at the New York School of Art, where Robert Henri was one of his teachers. Between 1906 and 1910 he made three trips to Europe (mainly Paris), but these had little influence on his style. In 1913 he exhibited (and sold) a picture at the Armory Show, but for the next ten years he earned his living entirely by commercial illustration such as magazine covers. After a successful one-man show in 1924, however, he was able to devote himself full-time to painting and thereafter enjoyed a fairly rapid rise to recognition as the outstanding exponent of American Scene Painting (he was given a retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and this set the seal on his reputation).

Hopper's distinctive style was formed by the mid-1920s and thereafter changed little. The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting—his best-known work, Nighthawks (1942, Art Inst. of Chicago), has an unusually large ‘cast’ with four. Typical settings are motel rooms, filling stations, cafeterias, and almost deserted offices at night. He was the first artist to seize on this specifically American visual world and make it definitively his own. However, although his work is rooted in a particular period and place, it also has a peculiarly timeless feel and deals in unchanging realities about the human condition. He never makes feelings explicit or tries to tell a story; rather he suggests weariness, frustration, and troubled isolation with a poignancy that rises above the specific. Hopper himself enjoyed solitude (although he was happily married to another ex-student of Henri) and he disliked talking about his work. When he did, he discussed it mainly in terms of technical problems; one of his best-known pronouncements is that he wanted only to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house’. Of Nighthawks he said: ‘I didn't see it as particularly lonely…Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a big city.’ Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings he exerts a powerful psychological impact that makes him one of the great painters of modern life.

Hopper worked in watercolour as well as oil and also made etchings, beginning in 1915—in fact his individual vision emerged in this medium before it did in painting. His best-known print is Evening Wind (1921), establishing a theme that would later often recur in his paintings—the female nude in a city interior. He virtually abandoned printmaking in 1923, but in spite of his short career in the medium he has been described as ‘undoubtedly the greatest American etcher of this century’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, American Prints: 1879–1979, 1980).

Hopper, Edward (1882–1967). American painter and etcher. He spent almost all his career in New York, but he travelled extensively in the USA, making long journeys by car. His main training was at the New York School of Art, where Robert Henri was one of his teachers. Between 1906 and 1910 he made three trips to Europe (mainly Paris), but these had little influence on his style. In 1913 he exhibited (and sold) a picture at the Armory Show, but from then until 1923 he earned his living entirely by commercial illustration. After turning to painting full-time in 1924, however, he enjoyed a fairly rapid rise to recognition as the outstanding exponent of American Scene Painting (he was given a retrospective exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 and this set the seal on his reputation). Hopper's distinctive style was formed by the mid-1920s and thereafter changed little. The central theme of his work is the loneliness of city life, generally expressed through one or two figures in a spare setting—his best-known work, Nighthawks (1942, Art Inst. of Chicago), has an unusually large ‘cast’ with four. Typical settings are motel rooms, filling stations, cafeterias, and almost deserted offices at night. He was the first artist to seize on this specifically American visual world and make it definitively his own. However, although his work is rooted in a particular period and place, it also has a peculiarly timeless feel and deals in unchanging realities about the human condition. He never makes feelings explicit or tries to tell a story; rather he suggests weariness, frustration, and troubled isolation with a poignancy that rises above the specific. Hopper himself enjoyed solitude (although he was happily married to another ex-student of Henri) and he disliked talking about his work. When he did, he discussed it mainly in terms of technical problems; one of his best-known pronouncements is that he wanted only to ‘paint sunlight on the side of a house’. Of Nighthawks he said: ‘I didn't see it as particularly lonely…Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a big city.’ Deliberately so or not, in his still, reserved, and blandly handled paintings he exerts a powerful psychological impact that makes him one of the great painters of modern life. Hopper worked in watercolour as well as oil and also made etchings, beginning in 1915—in fact his individual vision emerged in this medium before it did in painting. His best-known print is Evening Wind (1921), establishing a theme that would later often recur in his paintings—the female nude in a city interior. He virtually abandoned printmaking in 1923, but in spite of his short career in the medium he has been described as ‘undoubtedly the greatest American etcher of this century’ ( Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, American Prints 1879–1979, 1980).

Edward Hopper 1882–1967, American painter and engraver, b. Nyack, N.Y., studied in New York City with Robert Henri . Hopper lived in France for a year but was little influenced by the artistic currents there. His early paintings had slight success; he gained a reputation, however, through his etchings, which remain popular. The first one-man show of his paintings was held in 1920. Hopper excelled in creating realistic pictures of clear-cut, sunlit streets and houses, often without figures. In his paintings there is a frequent atmosphere of loneliness, an almost menacing starkness, and a clear sense of time of day or night. His work in oil and watercolor is slowly and carefully painted, with light and shade used for pattern rather than for modeling. Hopper is represented in many leading American museums. Early Sunday Morning (1930; Whitney Museum, N.Y.C.) and Nighthawks (1942; Art Institute of Chicago) are characteristic oils.

Bibliography: See catalog raisonné ed. by G. Levin (1995); catalog by L. Goodrich (1971); biographies by R. Hobbs (1987) and G. Levin (1995, repr. 2007); studies by L. Goodrich (1971), G. Levin (1981, repr. 1986), S. Wagstaff et al. (2004), C. Troyen et al. (2007), and O. Westheider and M. Philipp, ed. (2d ed., 2011).

Hopper, Edward (1882–1967) US realist painter. A pupil of Robert Henri, he was greatly influenced by the Ashcan school. His paintings of scenes in New England and New York City, such as Early Sunday Morning (1930), convey a unique sense of melancholic romanticism.