Edward Hopper, New York artist LCCN2016871478 (cropped).jpg Photo by Harris & Ewing, photographer – Wikimedia Commons

Top 10 Fascinating Facts about Edward Hopper


 

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, he was an American realist painter and printmaker. He was born in Nyack, New York in a yacht-building center in the Hudson River north of New York City. He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off family, his parents, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and Garret Henry Hopper were dry-goods merchants.

While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he created subdued drama out of commonplace subjects which were layered with poetic meanings. He was praised for the complete variety of America he portrayed through his paintings, and his career benefited significantly from his marriage to fellow artist Josephine Nivison. She contributed much to his work as a life model and a creative partner. In 2000, his birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

1. Life Before His Fame

Edward Hopper, New York artist LCCN2016871478.jpg Photo by Harris & Ewing, photographer – Wikimedia Commons

Edward and his sister attended both private and public schools. Edward was labeled as a good student in grade school, and by the time he turned five years old his talent for drawing was already apparent. Gradually, he absorbed his father’s intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures, he also demonstrated his mother’s artistic heritage.

His parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. Edward first began signing and dating his drawings at the age of 10, the earliest of these drawings are charcoal sketches of geometric shapes, a vase, bowl, cup, and boxes. He later began to examine light and shadow and continued throughout his career. 

By the time he reached his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil. He advanced to drawing from nature while still making political cartoons. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, which he copied from a reproduction in The Art Interchange which was a popular journal for amateur artists.

His earliest oil paintings like Old ice pond at Nyack and his 1898 painting Ships have been considered copies of paintings by artists including Bruce Crane and Edward Moran. Most of his early self-portraits tended to represent himself as skinny, ungraceful, and homely. Sometimes in depictions of immigrants or of women dominating men in comical situations. Later in life, he focused on mostly depicted women as the figures in his paintings. 

2. He made Interesting but Rushed Decisions

After 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. His parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income. While he was developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Edward was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Edward later decided to begin art studies with a correspondence course in 1899. He later transferred to the New Tork School of Art and Design which was the forerunner of the Parsons School of Design. He studied there for six years with teachers including William Merritt Chase who instructed him in oil paintings.

Edward modeled his style after Chase and the French impressionist masters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. He sketched live models and proved challenging and somewhat shocking for the conservatively raised Edward.

3. Life Lessons from His Teacher

Robert Henri (3118237886).jpg Photo by Unidentified photographer – Wikimedia Commons

While he was at the school of art and design, Edward was taught a lot of things that varied from art to life.  His teacher Robert Henri encouraged Edward to use their art to make a stir in the world. He also advised his students to forget about art and paint pictures of what interests them in life. Robert influenced Edward as well as future artists George Bellows and Rockwell Kent, he encouraged them to imbue their works with a modern spirit.

During his student years, he taught to examine types of paintings that included nudes, still life studies, landscapes, and portraits. In 1905, he landed a part-time job with an advertising agency where he created cover designs for trade magazines. He became bound to it by economic necessity until the mid-1920s. This all changed when he momentarily escaped by making three trips to Europe.

4. His Experience After Art School

Hotel-by-a-Railroad-Edward-Hopper-1952.jpg Photo by Edward Hopper – Wikimedia Commons

Edward began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark palette. He later shifted to the lighter shades of the impressionists before returning to the darker palette. Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments. Edward was attracted to realist art and he later admitted that no European influences other than French engraver Charles Meryon whose moody scenes Edward imitated.

After he returned from his European trip, he rented a studio in New York City where he struggled to define his own style. Being a freelancer, he was forced to solicit for projects and had to knock on the doors of magazine and agency offices to find business. Fellow illustrator Walter Tittle described Edward’s state in sharper terms like “suffering from long periods of unhappiness and sitting for days at a time” 

In 1912, Edward has included in the exhibition of the Independents a group of artists at the initiative of Robert Henri. However, he didn’t make any sales. In the same year, he traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts. To seek some inspiration and made his first outdoor paintings in America, he painted Squam Light which was the first of many lighthouse paintings to come.

5. His First Sale

In 1913, he earned $250 at the Armory Show when he sold his first painting Sailing 1911, to an American businessman Thomas F Vietor. By that time, he was thirty-one, even though he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order. His career wouldn’t catch on for many more years, he continued to participate in group exhibitions at smaller venues.

In 1914, he received a commission to create some movie posters and handle publicity for a movie company.  Even though he didn’t like illustration work, he was a lifelong devotee of the cinema and the theatre. In 1915, Edward turned to etch and by 1923 he had produced most of his 70 works in this medium. Edward did some outdoor oil paintings on visits to New England and Monhegan Island.

In the 1920s, all of the etchings he had submitted began to receive public recognition. Two notable oil paintings at the time were New York Interior 1921, and New York Restaurant 1922. Edward also painted two of his many window paintings to come. Through the frustrating years, Edward gained some recognition. In 1918, he was awarded the U.S Shipping Board Prize for his war poster ‘Smash the Hun’

In 1923, Edward received two awards for his etchings, the logan prize from the Chicago Society of Etchers, and the W. A. Bryan Prize.

6. Interesting how he had Slow Breakthrough

In 1923, Edward had a slow climb and finally produced a breakthrough. He re-encountered Josephine Nivison who was an artist and former student of Robert Henri. They met during a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts. With the help of Josephine, six of Edwards’s Glouster watercolors were admitted to an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 1923.

One of them was up purchased by the museum for its permanent collection for the sum of $100. Edward sold all his watercolors at a one-man show the following year. Eventually, he decided to put illustrations behind him. At forty-one, Edward received further recognition for his work, but he continued to harbor bitterness about his career.

He later turned done appearances and awards, and his financial stability was secured by steady sales. Edward would live a simple, stable life and would continue creating art in his personal style for four more decades. 

His painting the Two on the Aisle 1927 was sold for a personal record $1,500. This enabled Edward to purchase an automobile which he used to make field trips to remote areas of New England. In 1929, he produced Chop Suey and Railroad Sunset, in the following year, art patron Stephen Clark donated House by the  Railroad 1925 to the Museum of Modern Art.

Edward painted his last self-portrait in oil around 1930. However, Josephine posed for many of his paintings and she sat for only one formal oil portrait by her husband, Jo Painting 1936.

7. His Personal Life 

Even though Josephine and Edward were opposites, they got married a year later with artist Guy Pene du Bois as their best man. She subordinated her career to his spare walk-up apartment in the city and their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod. She managed his career and his interviews were his primary model and his life companion.

Josephine helped him get most of his work out into the museum. With her help, he began making money from his work.

8. He had Personal Touch in Art

Even though he was best known for his oil paintings, Edward initially achieved recognition for his watercolors and he also produced some commercially successful etchings. His notebooks contain high-quality pen and pencil sketches that were never meant to be seen by the public eye. 

Edward never paid attention to geometrical design and the careful placement of human figures in proper balance with their environment. He is known as a slow and methodical artist whose work is very recognizable. He derived his subject matter from two primary sources like the common features of American life and its inhabitants. Edward later achieved his mature style, his art remained consistent and self-contained in spite of the numerous art trends that came and went during his long career.

9. His Addition to American Art

Macombs-Dam-Bridge-Edward-Hopper-1935.jpg Photo by Edward Hopper – Wikimedia Commons

Edward employed a form of realism adopted by another leading American realist, Andrew Wyeth. However, his technique was completely different from Andrew’s hyper-detailed style. In addition to some of his contemporaries, Edward shared his urban sensibility with Joan Sloan and George Bellows but avoided their overt action and violence. 

Even though he was compared to his contemporary Norman Rockwell, Edward didn’t like the comparison. He considered himself a more subtle, less illustrative, and certainly not sentimental. Edward rejected comparisons with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton and stated that the American Scene painters caricatured America. Noting that his work was always meant to reflect himself.

10. The Great Memories 

All of the papers and drawings in the Hopper home passed into the keeping of family friend Arthayer Sanborn. Most of the other significant paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.