Edward Hopper
Birth Date: July 22, 1882
Death Date: May 15, 1967
Artist Gallery
Edward Hopper was perhaps the supreme American realist. While he was of roughly the same generation as the Ashcan School, he was not one of them. Hopper’s work was quite different. His reaction to the Fauvists, Cubists, and Expressionists of his day was to ignore them and pursue his individual vision of modern life. He painted through his eyes and his eyes only. There is starkness, a sense of loneliness and detachment in his work that sets him apart.   Hopper was born in Nyack, New York in 1882. From 1900 until 1906, he studied at the New York School of Art under Robert Henri. Henri taught him to study, observe and record his surroundings. Between 1906 and 1910, he made three trips abroad, but remained essentially unaffected by European movements. Between 1915 and 1923, Hopper completed some fifty etchings that helped clarify his artistic personality. In these prints, he articulated themes to which he would continually return throughout his career-the solitary individual looking out a window, the solitary building and landscape.  In 1923, Hopper married Josephine (Jo) Nivison, who attended art school with Hopper. Nivison posed for nearly half of the female figure pieces Hopper created and also encouraged him to engage in different forms of art, including watercolors. By the mid-1920s, especially in watercolors of houses, streets and village life, his mature style was formed. His colors, though bright, tend to be cold. He once said, Maybe I’m not very human. What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house. His pictures of buildings show how Hopper used sunlight and shadow to impose interesting arrangements of light and dark patterns across the face of the painting.    By the late 1920s, Hopper was recognized, with Charles Burchfield, as the most successful interpreter of what was to be called the American Scene. In 1929, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s second exhibition, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930, The House by the Railroad. The Whitney Museum also bought Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, the museum’s most expensive purchase up to that time. Like many other artists of his generation, Hopper and Jo summered in New England, especially along the coast, where he created many of his works. Between the 1930s and 1950, his work depicted common locations and nearby attractions they visited. He also traveled to Vermont and Charleston to explore themes he could weave into his painting. His work was showcased at the Whitney Museum well into his later career. Although he was still receiving awards in the 1940s and 1950s, he found himself losing favor as the school of Abstract Expressionism began to dominate the art world. He continued to paint into the 1950s and 1960s, with his last major work being Intermission in 1963. He died in 1967 in his studio in New York City. His wife died only 10 months later.