and boat docks of the coastal town. Hopper was unusually productive, possibly egged on by Kroll’s relentless good humour and prodigious output. Leon Kroll would return often to Gloucester, eventually becoming a fixture there until late in his life. The picturesque port drew artists from everywhere so Hopper found it difficult to set up an easel and not find himself intruding into someone else’s scene.
His first time painting American scenes out of doors seemed to inspire him and he turned out Gloucester Harbor, Squam Light, Briar Neck, Tall Masts and Italian Quarter. Each one was carved out in bright sunlight with no gauzy atmospheric effects. Virtually no human figures are present, but their boats and houses and the thrusting masts of the moored ships suggest a busy population. A thick impasto of surf crashes against the rocks at Briar Neck and large rocks litter the back alley of the Italian Quarter merging their hard-edged angles with the slanting roof eaves of the town’s frame houses. Squam Light with its wind-scoured outbuildings perches above a beach with drawn-up dories. The white of the lighthouse and sun-bleached houses is laid on with thick strokes. The facility with which the painting is dashed onto the canvas suggests Hopper was enjoying himself. Only the always-changing sky seems to have been heavily worked until one of its many permutations remained behind.
28. Tall Masts, 1912. Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 74.3 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
29. American Village, 1912. Oil on canvas, 65.7 × 96.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
30. Yonkers, 1916. Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 73.9 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
On returning to New York, his mind was still lingering on the summer’s activity while through the carriage window he watched small towns rush past. Back at home, he painted American Village, an early evening look down from an overpass at a village street. The windows of its stone-front buildings are still shaded with individual awnings. Street level awnings hide the shopping populace from view. A quirk of the light singles out a white frame house and yellow trolley-car at the end of the main street, but the rest of the pavement activity is only suggested by strategic paint dabs as low clouds roll overhead before the arrival of a summer rainstorm.
Invigorated by his summer of painting, Hopper joined Kroll, George Bellows, eight other hopefuls and the ubiquitous Robert Henri back at the MacDowell Club. In January 1913, when the hanging was completed and the doors opened, Hopper had hung two paintings, Squam Light and La Berge, yet another of his Paris paintings of the Seine. He demonstrated an almost pathological unwillingness or inability to separate himself from his French work in the face of monumental indifference. Predictably, he sold nothing and was once again ignored by the critics.
Hopper dragged himself back to The System, Magazine of Business and added fiction illustration for the Associated Sunday Magazine, a Sunday supplement tabloid carried by major city newspapers. But a more bittersweet test of Hopper’s resolve was still ahead, as judging was underway for inclusion in the February opening of a show to be held at 25th Street and Lexington Avenue in the cavernous hall of the 69th Regiment Armory. The 1913 Armory Show would turn the art world on its head and Edward Hopper desperately wanted be a part of the excitement.
The opening of the Armory Show on 17 February 1913 tore into the staid American art scene with 1,250 paintings sculptures and decorative works by more than 300 European and American artists. From Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase to the realist works of the American Ash Can School, there were no limits or boundaries. Critics rushed about seeking the high ground, moral, or creative or both, but mostly followed the popular line, or as one critic wrote:
“It was a good show…but don’t do it again.”
Newspaper cartoonists had a field day with the abstract works.
Following a series of independent art shows in France, England, Germany and Italy, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors International Exhibition of Modern Art suddenly brought the works of “those people across the Atlantic” to the creatively constipated, conservatively conformist art scene that had dominated the United States for decades. It brought to light for a new broad segment of the public those American artists who also practised this lurid internalised alchemy of paint and canvas, or stone and chisel.
During the selection process, the Domestic Exhibition Committee was chaired by William Glackens, one of Henri’s circle, part of the “Eight” show, who contributed regularly to the on-going MacDowell hangings. This committee managed to offend almost everybody by its original invitations for admission requiring originality and a “personal note” in each artist’s work as part of the committee’s guidelines. Hopper was not automatically invited to submit as in the past.
A backlash among American artists finally wedged open the door to submissions by uninvited artists. Hopper, hat in hand and no longer one of the favoured Henri clique, brought two of his 1911 oils, Sailing and Blackwell’s Island. Only Sailing, the jaunty little sailboat, was allowed to be hung.
Unprecedented crowds shouldered their way into the Armory hall. Guffaws of laughter, gasps and curses punctuated the rumbling murmur of the crowd as they passed works by Kandinsky, Picabia, Matisse, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Brancusi, Everett Shinn, John Sloan. The walls were alight with colour and movement.
Like many of the American artists, Hopper surreptitiously hung about near his painting, looking for reactions, listening for comments. Nearby, his old instructor and leader among the classical Realists, William Merritt Chase, huffed and puffed aloud over the “rubbish” on exhibit. From the crowds trudging past, pointing and whispering behind their hands, stepped a textile manufacturer from Manhattan named Thomas F. Victor. He liked the picture of the sailboat, noted its price was $300, and being a successful manufacturer, offered $250. Hopper accepted and a show official affixed a “sold” ticket to the picture’s frame.
Finally, Hopper had sold a painting, something created from his memory and imagination. The $250 sale price is equivalent to $5,000 in 2006 dollars.[13] This is significant money and a jubilant and revitalised Edward Hopper took the train home to Nyack to show his parents that he was finally on the fine art track to success. The legendary Armory Show closed on 15 March. Garrett Hopper, always lingering at the edge of frail health, died on 18 September 1913. Edward had vindicated himself to his father who, considering his own fruitless struggle for success, must have been very pleased for his son.
Edward Hopper had to take stock of his life at this juncture. Realistically, his sale of a painting was more a symbol of the door cracking open than an arrival, a confirmation of his long sought after success as a fine artist. He was past thirty years of age and had developed a facility with the painting medium that obeyed what he chose to place on the canvas. Abstraction and “modernism,” as featured in the Armory Show, held no thrall for him. He had committed himself to realism and the painter’s ability to translate his personality to the selection, presentation, addition and subtraction of elements in a given scene. Now he needed to flush away the past struggle and move on. To begin with, in November 1913, he began documenting his sales in an account book, carefully noting each acquisition of cash, no matter the source. In doing so he came to grips with the illustrative work that he needed to support his painting. His creative vocabulary was in hand and each canvas sold trimmed time from the purgatory of commercial illustration.
In December 1913 Hopper sought out a new and larger studio. He discovered Washington Square in Greenwich Village and a run-down Greek Revival style building at Three Washington Square North facing the park. It had been built in the 1830s and rehabilitated
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