22 July 1882, Edward Hopper was born in the mid-size, prosperous town of Nyack, New York, located on the Hudson River. His father tried his hand at sales and finally opened a dry goods store that failed to achieve any great success. Edward was the second child in the family, arriving two years after his sister, Marion. While Hopper senior toiled amid bolts of cloth, cards of buttons, and celluloid collars, Edward’s mother kept her son and daughter supplied with creative tools targeting the theatre and art. An early prized possession for young Edward was a slate blackboard and chalk. He could draw and erase with impunity, but any particularly satisfying result lacked permanence. He began sketching and painting early, taking his sketchbook with him on frequent jaunts into the nearby countryside.
The Hopper home, at 82 North Broadway, belonged to his widowed grandmother, Martha Griffiths Smith, and was the site of Hopper’s parents’ marriage in 1879. It was a rambling two-storey white frame house sheltered by trees and punctured by shuttered windows beneath deep-set eaves, decorated with cornices and belted with a corner porch across the front. To Edward, this place, with its dark windows that revealed nothing of the lives lived inside, represented home, personal solitude, and a refuge during his early years. Its counterparts would appear repeatedly in his future paintings.
Edward and his older sister Marion attended private schools and came home to rooms cleaned by an Irish maid, and delivery boys bringing groceries and other purchases bought on account in town. His grades were above average throughout high school. One of his favourite subjects was French, which he studied and learned well enough to be able to read it throughout his life.
Hopper spent his adolescence wandering along the bank of a nearby lake, where ice was harvested in the winter, sketching people, boats, and landscapes. Yacht building flourished in Nyack and the boat docks along the river became hangouts for Edward and his friends. They formed the Boys’ Yacht Club and piloted their sailboats with varying degrees of expertise. From those days, Edward carried with him a love of boats and the sea that lasted the rest of his life.
Hopper’s religious education in the Baptist Bible School was at odds with the freedoms of adolescence. He absorbed teachings on the rewards of a frugal lifestyle and the righteous need to step back from the gratifications of lust, sex, and other “immoral behaviour”. This reticence and retreat into long silences later evolved into bouts of depression when his self-perceived skills failed him and the armour of his ego no longer appeared to sustain his ambition. Already he had developed a placid mask to hide behind and contain the demons of perceived inadequacy that dogged his career.
If Hopper’s father bequeathed any legacy to his son, it was the love of reading. While the elder Hopper struggled with his business books and accounts, Edward was at home in his library with shelves groaning under English, French, and Russian classic literature. From Turgenev to Victor Hugo and Tolstoy, Edward delved into books to discover words for the feelings that he could not disclose. He adopted his father’s bookish salvation as a retreat.
By 1895, Hopper’s natural talent was obvious in his technically well-executed oil paintings. He relished details in his meticulous drawings of navy ships and the carefully-observed rigging of the racing yachts built in Nyack shipyards. He always came back to the sea and shore throughout his life, back to the big sky continuously redrawing itself in white on blue from opal pale to dangerous cerulean, and the surf-shaped rocks fronting long sweeps of dunes topped by hissing grasses. By 1899 he had finished high school and looked towards the Big City down the Hudson River, the centre of American art.
Hopper’s mother saw to it that Edward and Marion were exposed to art in books, magazines, prints, and illustrations. She spent a considerable sum on pencils, paints, chalks, sketch pads, watercolour paper, brushes, and ink pens. While Marion preferred to pursue theatrical drama, Edward practised various art techniques, watching how light gave or robbed objects of dimension and how line contained shapes and directed the eye. He went to school copying weekly magazine covers created by the great illustrators of the time: Edwin Austin Abbey, Charles Dana Gibson, Gilbert Gaul, as well as the sketches of Old Masters: Rembrandt and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
Hopper absorbed all the fine examples and still retained a sense of humour as a safety valve to release some of the high expectations under pressure. His cartoons and lampoons remained with him as age further hardened his face to the world. Often they represented deeply felt emotions, but were tossed off with a laugh so as not to draw attention to the man behind the pencil.
With his father’s practical approval and his mother’s profession-oriented encouragement, he decided to pursue a career as a commercial illustrator and enrolled in the New York School of Illustrating.
Magazine and graphic poster illustration was in its “golden period” at the turn of the century. The mechanics of printing had embraced the photographic method of transferring the finished drawing to the printing plate with a half-tone screen. Freedom to employ a variety of media gave the artist a broad scope of interpretation.
Since there were so many magazines, advertisements, posters, and stories to be illustrated, good illustrators who met deadlines and were literate enough to capture the core idea for the image were in great demand. There was good money in illustration. Publications and corporations who linked their public identity with the work of these men prized the most well-known artists. Enrolled on a monthly basis, he commuted daily from Nyack to New York City, working in the classroom and at home on “practice sheets” devised by the school’s “dean”, Charles Hope Provost. Hopper had already spent time after high school copying illustrations of his favourite artists and churning out original sketches of characters and scenes from literature. After a year of Provost’s shallow instruction, Hopper raised his sights to study fine art as well as commercial illustration. His parents agreed to pay the $15 a month fee and in 1900, his portfolio was impressive enough to be accepted at the New York School of Art, founded and run by William Merritt Chase.
Ile Saint-Louis, 1909.
Oil on canvas, 59.6 × 72.8 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Après-Midi de juin or L’Après-Midi de printemps (Afternoon in June or Spring Afternoon), 1907.
Oil on canvas, 59.7 × 73 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Chase was a product of the 19th-century European academy system. He came from Williamsburg, Indiana, showed early artistic promise and found enough local patronage in St Louis to afford European study. His efforts placed him in the Royal Academy of Munich in 1872. His return to the United States in the late 1870s led art critics, reviewers, and trend prognosticators to suggest he would become one of the great American painters. They were to be disappointed.
Chase’s style was entrenched in European realism and his subjects lacked an “American” flavour. As the moral climate shifted towards a more uplifting fiction, away from the low and gritty reality of the late 19th-century American scene, so he shifted to the pose of the flâneur, a French term for a detached observer of life. Chase painted from life, but a moral, uplifting, civilised life that appealed to upper class art buyers and art students anxious to sell. His lessons in composition and his flawless technique were valuable to many of his students who went on to eclipse him: Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Edward Hopper.
Another instructor who crossed Hopper’s path was the young Kenneth Hayes Miller. While teaching at the New York school, Miller was developing his painting style that matured in the early 1920s. His lush urban paintings were referred to by one contemporary critic as an “attempt to make Titian feel at home on 14th Street and crowd Veronese into a department store”.
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