Background
Hoppin was born in Providence, R. I, in 1870, the son of Dr. Courtland Hoppin and Mary Frances (Clark) Hoppin. His father died when the boy was six years old, and in 1878 the family went to Europe and lived for three years in Stuttgart.
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Joseph Clark Hoppin
Edit ProfileEducation
In Stuttgart Hoppin was for a time a student at the Real-Schule. On his return to America he attended Groton School and Harvard College. At Harvard he developed the interest in ancient civilization which determined his later career. He took his bachelor's degree in 1893; in the autumn of that year he entered the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and in the following spring he took part in the excavations at the Her'um near Argos under the direction of Prof. Charles Waldstein (later Sir Charles Walston). In 1894-96 he studied at Berlin and Munich and took his doctor's degree at Munich, presenting a dissertation on the vase painter, Euthymides, published in Munich in 1896.
Career
His interest in ancient vase painting had become dominant, and Dr. Waldstein naturally assigned to him the task of publishing the vases and fragments from the Her'um. On the study of these he spent a great part of the years 1897 and 1898, being associated in both years with the School of Classical Studies at Athens and appointed lecturer on Greek vases for the session of 1897-98. Although his manuscript was prepared at this time, the actual publication of his portion of the work did not occur until 1905, when it appeared in Volume II of The Argive Her'um, edited by Professor Waldstein.
In 1898 Hoppin returned to America and was immediately appointed instructor in Greek art at Wellesley College. After one year there he was called to Bryn Mawr, where he taught until 1904, when he resigned. He then for several years made his home in Washington, though in 1904-05 he was again in Athens as professor of the Greek language and literature in the American School, and in 1910-11, was a member of the expedition to explore ancient Cyrene in North Africa, under the direction of his lifelong friend, Richard Norton. The outbreak of the World War found him in Paris, where his ample means enabled him to do much for the relief of suffering. He made several attempts to discover a more official way of giving service but was refused because of age. At last, in 1917, he accepted an offer to take the place of the professor of classical archeology at Bryn Mawr during the absence in service of Professor Rhys Carpenter. Thus for two years he was again engaged in teaching.
Meanwhile, besides several short articles, he had brought out a new and enlarged edition of his thesis under the title Euthymides and His Fellows (1917) and had conceived the plans of what will probably be regarded as his greatest contributions to science, A Handbook of Attic Red-Figured Vases, which was published in two volumes in 1919, and A Handbook of Greek Black-Figured Vases, published at Paris in 1924. These contain very complete and carefully compiled lists of all vases signed by Greek potters and painters or attributed to ancient painters, and have become standard reference books for all workers in the field. Long before the completion of the Black-Figured Vases, Hoppin was stricken with a fatal disease, but he kept at work in spite of a series of operations and increasing pain. In the last year of his life he worked at his final publication, a volume of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum devoted to his own excellent collection of Greek vases and that of his friend Albert Gallatin of New York. Final proofs he was unable to read, and the book was brought out in 1926 under the supervision of Mr. Gallatin.
Achievements
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Hoppin's collection of vases, together with a collection of Greek terra-cotta figures and Etruscan gold work and bronzes, he bequeathed to his Alma Mater, as well as his very complete working library on Greek ceramics. These are now deposited in the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University. His career as an archeologist is significant because it shows that the "private scholar, " so familiar in Europe, may also thrive under American conditions.
Connections
He was twice married, first to Dorothy Woodville Rockhill in 1901, and second to Eleanor Dennistoun Wood in 1915.
