Edward Hopper. Light and Dark. Gerry Souter

      “Henri’s class was the seat of sedition among the young,” wrote Guy du Bois. Vachel Lindsay noted Henri demanded “…force, likeness and expression” in the students’ portraits.[3]

      Hopper’s nude studies under Henri’s tutelage between 1902 and 1904 reflect the models as solid shapes formed by light and shadow rather than linear creatures floating in their space. They have no identity in their faces, but each body is architecturally supported, its light-modulated surfaces yielding to gravity and individuality in every plane.

      One by one, Hopper carved out these studies and one by one they received Henri’s red daub of paint in the corner as a sign of approval. By 1905, Hopper had rejected Chase’s still-lifes, his showboating lectures to the entire class from a hapless student’s easel. Henri spoke quietly to each artist, his words to their ears. His demands that the students look beyond the confines of the studio to their own worlds produced some of Hopper’s most predictive works from 1904 to 1906. These vertical compositions showing snapshots of country scenes presage Hopper’s future minimalist approach, his high contrast use of light and deep shadow to block up masses and sweeten with eye-catching details. They lack, however, the maturity of his later work with these subjects.

      Robert Henri’s style of intense and personal criticism of student work, his engaging the artists to use their intellect as well as their brushes and paints, and his ruthless culling of unsuccessful attempts with two slashes of paint across the offending work made his sought-after praise even more valued. As for Henri’s own painting skills, Hopper was a bit more sparing in his praise: “Henri wasn’t a very good painter, at least I don’t think so. He was a better teacher than a painter.”[4]

      But Hopper became a star student, winning a scholarship in life drawing and first prize in oil painting during one of the school’s concours competitions. His education was spurred on throughout 1903 and 1904 by these prizes and the adulation that led to his teaching Saturday classes in life drawing, composition, sketching and painting.

      By 1905 Edward Hopper looked out of his framed self-portraits from deep blue eyes shaded by uncompromising brows, down a well-shaped but not over-large nose. The mouth, however, begins to tell the story. It is a petulant mouth stretched wide with the thin upper lip pressed against a demanding, insistent slab of a lower lip. He saw himself without flattery and stamped the canvas with an implacable image. His restless and relentless nature drove him in many directions.

      He began taking commercial illustration jobs to earn money on a part-time basis for the C. C. Phillips and Company Advertising Agency at 24 East 22nd Street. Student Coles Phillips founded the agency that lasted for a year until he closed it to freelance as an independent illustrator. Hopper produced some commercial work, but his heart wasn’t in it. He had been a student for seven years and had amassed a considerable body of knowledge that now needed application. He had enjoyed instruction and praise from teachers who were polar opposites of each other.

      While his technique had been improved and refined with a variety of media, his thinking about art had been profoundly affected. He now needed to know if his own personality, the sum of his experience, could be translated to the painted surface and find an audience. He searched for a motivational jump-start to his yearning to be a fine artist, a painter in the grand manner.

      Paris, Impressionists and True Love

      In October 1906 he chose the route most travelled by artists at that time, a journey to Paris, the world’s cultural shrine. At the age of twenty-four, the tall boy from Nyack, New York went off to “see the The elephant”. In that same month, as Hopper embarked for the French capital, Paul Cezanne died, his work only attracting attention in his later years. Of the mighty band of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters who had stood the art world on its ear, only Edgar Degas remained. He lived on in Paris, virtually blind, creating clay sculptures by touch. The public was unaware of him until after his death in 1917.

      But the word had gone out and young men – and some persistent young women – with paint boxes and folding easels crowded the banks of the Seine with its bridges, the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse. They crowded the tables at the Dôme and Moulin Rouge. Prostitutes flourished. Pimps thrived and many young artists traded their talent for cheap wine and absinthe, holding down wire-backed chairs clustered around café tables littered with glassware and small saucers soiling paper table covers scratched with scribbled graffiti that would come to nothing.

      Automobiles chugged and popped on spoked wheels announcing themselves with bulb-horns hooting at crossings. They added their few exhausts and their aroma of burning castor oil to the million chimneypots that sent charcoal and wood smoke into the miasma that hung above the city. Horse droppings littered the streets.

      Pissoires and sewage wagons added their fragrance to each early morning, almost overwhelming the baguettes rapidly circulating in carts from bakeries to restaurants to be eaten before they turned to hard crumbly bird food. Paris was a rich stew of action, smells and grand architecture thickened with islands of leisured timelessness utterly foreign to any American brimming with the need to succeed.

      On 24 October, Edward Hopper arrived at a Baptist mission at 48 rue de Lille, the Eglise Evangélique Baptiste run by a Mrs. Louise Jammes, a widow who lived with two teenaged sons. The New York Hoppers knew her through their church. As soon as Edward could manage he applied gesso ground to some 15” × 9” wood panels and set out with his paints and brushes. The colours in his box reflected the darker tones he had worked with under Henri’s tutelage in New York: umbers, siennas, browns, greys, creams, cerulean blue. His eye immediately sought out the juxtaposition of geometric shapes.

      Shafts and strikes of light on surfaces gave the images depth and a dynamic of expectancy. Where there were no people, it seemed as if someone had just stepped away from a window or the last of a crowd had just passed along the deserted bridge. After years of drawing from models at school and rendering gay young people for his commercial illustration jobs, people vanished from his work except as distant compositional objects – mere dabs of the brush or people-shaped objects.

      On balance, when he was not painting in oils, he sketched the denizens of the Paris streets and created a collection of watercolour caricatures from the demi-monde and the lower depths of French society. These character types were not new to him. While at school he had rented a small studio on 14th Street. Prostitutes patrolled that area with insouciant assurance.

      11. Trees in Sunlight, Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1907. Oil on canvas, 59.7 × 73 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

      12. Le Pont des Arts, 1907. Oil on canvas, 59.5 × 73 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

      13. Le Quai des Grands Augustins, 1909. Oil on canvas, 59.7

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