Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker.

While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.

Hopper created subdued drama out of commonplace subjects layered with a poetic meaning, inviting narrative interpretations.

He was praised for "complete verity" in the America he portrayed.

He enjoyed a long and complicated marriage with fellow artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work both as a life-model and as his unofficial manager.

Hopper is one of America's most renowned artists.

His influence on art and popular culture has been substantial.

Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City.

He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off family.

His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant.

Although not as successful as his forebears, Garrett provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife's inheritance.

He retired at age forty-nine.

Edward and his sister, Marion, attended both private and public schools.

They were raised in a strict Baptist home.

His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.

In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, which he copied from a reproduction in The Art Interchange, a popular journal for amateur artists.

Hopper's other earliest oils, such as Old ice pond at Nyack and his c.1898 painting Ships, have been identified as copies of paintings by artists including Bruce Crane and Edward Moran.

In his early self-portraits, Hopper tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely.

Though a tall and quiet teenager, his prankish sense of humor found outlet in his art, sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comical situations.

Later in life, he mostly depicted women as the figures in his paintings.

In high school (he graduated from Nyack High School in 1899), he dreamed of becoming a naval architect, but after graduation declared his intention to pursue a career in art.

Hopper's parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income.

In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He later said, "I admire him greatly...I read him over and over again."

Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899.

Soon he transferred to the New York School of Art and Design, the forerunner of Parsons School of Design.

There, he studied for six years with teachers including William Merritt Chase, who instructed him in oil painting.

Early on, Hopper modeled his style after Chase and French Impressionist masters Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Sketching from live models, however, proved challenging and somewhat shocking for the conservatively raised Hopper.

Among his best-known paintings are New York Movie (1939) and Nighthawks (1942).

His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

It is now operated as the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, serving as a nonprofit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and special events.

Hopper was a good student in grade school, and by the time he was five his talent with drawing was already apparent.

He readily absorbed his father's intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures.

He also demonstrated his mother's artistic heritage.

Hopper's parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books.

Hopper first began signing and dating his drawings at the age of 10.

Among the earliest of these drawings are charcoal sketches of geometric shapes, a vase, bowl, cup, and boxes.

The detailed examination of light and shadow that continued throughout his career is already visible in these early works.

By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil—drawing from nature while also making political cartoons.