Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 — May 15, 1967)

7 min readMay 7, 2021

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. His career benefited decisively from his marriage to fellow-artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work, both as a life-model and as a creative partner. Hopper was a minor-key artist, creating subdued drama out of commonplace subjects ‘layered with a poetic meaning’, inviting narrative interpretations, often unintended. He was praised for ‘complete verity’ in the America he portrayed.

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

Childhood home of Edward Hopper in Nyack, New York

Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City.[1][2] 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.[3] 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.[4] Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. They were raised in a strict Baptist home.[5] His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper’s mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.[6]

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 Art Center.[7] It serves as a nonprofit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and special events.[8]

Vase (1893), example of Edward Hopper’s earliest signed and dated artwork with attention to light and shadow.

Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He readily absorbed his father’s intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures. He also demonstrated his mother’s artistic heritage.[9] 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 ten. The earliest of these drawings include charcoal sketches of geometric shapes, including a vase, bowl, cup and boxes.[10] The detailed examination of light and shadow which carried on throughout the rest of his career can already be found in these early works.[10] By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil — drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons.[11] 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.[12][13]

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 comic situations. Later in life, he mostly depicted women as the figures in his paintings.[14] In high school (he graduated from Nyack High School in 1899),[15] he dreamed of being a naval architect, but after graduation he declared his intention to follow an art career. Hopper’s parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income.[16] 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.”[17]

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 — May 15, 1967)

Contents

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

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