Background
Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882 in Nyack, New York, United States. He was the son of Elizabeth Griffiths (Smith) Hopper and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant.
Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882 in Nyack, New York, United States. He was the son of Elizabeth Griffiths (Smith) Hopper and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant.
Hopper's parents encouraged him to study commercial illustration instead of fine art after finishing high school in 1899. Accordingly, he spent a year at the New York School of Illustration in Manhattan before transferring to the more serious New York School of Art to realize his dream. His teachers there included the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, the founder of the school, and Robert Henri, a leading figure of the Ashcan school.
It's worth noting, that, in 1965, Edward received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art (present-day the University of the Arts (Philadelphia)).
Hopper made three long visits to Europe between 1906 and 1910, 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 Edward was over 40, he supported himself by commercial art and illustration, which he loathed, but the painter 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, Hopper began, in the early 1920's, 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.
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 - street lamps, store windows, lighted interiors. This interplay of lights of different 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.
The painter's 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.
During his lifetime, Edward exhibited his work in a variety of group shows in New York, including the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910 and the famous Armory Show of 1913, in which he was represented by a painting, titled "Sailing". It's also worth mentioning, that the painter was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1952.
Edward Hopper was a notable realist painter, who inspired countless painters, photographers, set designers, dancers, writers and musicians. The term "Hopperesque" is now widely used to connote images reminiscent of Hopper's moods and subjects. In the visual arts, Hopper's influence has touched artists in a range of media, including Mark Rothko, George Segal, Banksy, Ed Ruscha and Tony Oursler.
Hopper had no less of an impact on cinema. Generations of filmmakers have drawn inspiration from Hopper's dramatic viewpoints, lighting and overall moods, among them, Sam Mendes, David Lynch, Robert Siodmak, Orson Welles, Wim Wenders and Billy Wilder. Hopper's painting, "House by the Railroad", inspired Alfred Hitchcock's house in "Psycho", as well as that in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven".
The painter's most notable works include "Automat" (1927), "Chop Suey" (1929), "Nighthawks" (1942) and "Office in a Small City" (1953).
Edward received a number of awards, including the W. A. Bryan Prize, the Wesley Logan Prize, the Baltimore Museum of Art Award, Temple Gold Medal and others.
Edward and his only sister, Marion, were raised in a strict Baptist home.
Quotations:
"What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."
"The only real influence I've ever had was myself."
"To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're traveling."
"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint."
"The only quality, that endures in art, is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring."
Edward Hopper married Josephine Verstille Nivis, a painter, on July 9, 1924. The couple spent winters in New York, on the top floor of an old house on Washington Square, where Hopper had lived since 1913.
Edward Hopper was a dry-goods merchant.
Josephine Hopper was an American painter, who studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship.
