Luminous, spare, and evocative—the paintings of Edward Hopper are affectionate observations of American life featuring subjects that range from diners, hotel lobbies, offices, and theaters in New York City to the country houses, churches, seascapes, and Main Streets of rural New England. All of these artworks have one thing in common: Hopper’s fascination with light. He painted sun streaming through curtained windows, clapboard farmsteads in the warm glow and long shadows of late afternoon, and starkly lit interiors framed by darkness. Dramatic illumination makes Hopper’s pictures strongly cinematic, although they never offer a complete narrative. Instead, they hint at the artist’s deep love for the natural world and his intense curiosity about his fellow human beings.
Early Life, Education, Interest in French Painting
Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, and studied fine art at the New York School of Art. There he worked with Robert Henri, a prominent realist painter who urged his students to find their subjects in the everyday world around them. After graduating, Hopper took several trips to Paris, where he saw the work of Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet, two of the most inventive painters of modern Parisian life. The twin influences of advanced American and French realism remained crucial to Hopper’s work for the rest of his life.
Achieving Success, Office at Night
Although Hopper is today one of the most beloved of American realists, he was slow to achieve success. He had his first solo exhibition in 1920, at the age of 37; nothing sold and there was little critical attention. But by 1930 his paintings had started to enter museum collections, and in 1933 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, mounted the first retrospective of his work. Office at Night (1940), one of Hopper’s best-known paintings, was inspired by a scene the artist glimpsed through an office window during a ride on one of New York’s elevated trains. In 1948, Hopper wrote to a Walker curator to explain that his aim with the painting was to evoke a lonely office interior high in the air. He declined to be specific about what was happening there, preferring to let viewers construct their own narratives.
New England Landscapes
Beginning in 1934, Hopper and his wife, Jo, spent every summer in Truro, Massachusetts, a seaside hamlet on the tip of Cape Cod. During the 33 years they summered there, Hopper produced more than 100 oils and watercolors depicting Truro and surrounding areas. Although his gallery urged him to produce conventional maritime scenes, he preferred to focus on the area’s cottages, roads, and inland farms as they appeared at different times of day.
Hopper remained faithful to realism until the end of his life, although by the time of his death in 1967 the style was out of fashion. Today, however, he is seen as a transitional figure was important for early Pop artists such as George Segal, Jasper Johns, and Wayne Thiebaud. In 1968, Hopper’s widow donated more than 3,000 of his works to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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