Edward Hopper [1882 – 1967]

1. Edward Hopper [1882 – 1967] House by the Railroad c. 1925

3. Hopper was born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City. • He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off, middle-class family.

4. Edward Hopper was an American painter whose highly individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. • His paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and loneliness.

6. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant, and his wife Elizabeth Griffiths Smith. • Though 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. Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. • They were raised in a strict Baptist home. • His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.

8. Hopper studied illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to 1900. • Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri.

9. Robert Henri, taught life class. • Henri encouraged his students to use their art to "make a stir in the world". He also advised his students, “It isn’t the subject that counts but what you feel about it” and “Forget about art and paint pictures of what interests you in life.” • In this manner, Henri influenced and encouraged Hopper so that his art reflected a modern spirit.

10. His early paintings, were committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics that he was to retain throughout his career: • compositional style based on simple, large geometric forms; • flat masses of color; and • the use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals, horizontals, and diagonals.

11. In 1905, Hopper landed a part-time job with an advertising agency, where he did cover designs for trade magazines. • Much like famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth, Hopper came to detest illustration. He was bound to it by economic necessity until the mid-1920s.

12. Although one of Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a commercial illustrator for the next decade.

13. Hopper spent much of his time drawing street and café scenes, and going to the theater and opera. • Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, Hopper was attracted to realist art.

14. Office at Night, c.1940

15. New York Restaurant c.1922

17. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad (Museum of Modern Art, New York City), a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style.

19. Describe the mood of this painting.

20. The emphasis on blunt shapes and angles and the stark play of light and shadow were in keeping with his earlier work, but the mood—which was the real subject of the painting—was new: It conveyed an atmosphere of all-embracing loneliness and almost eerie solitude.

21. The sunlight illuminating House by the Railroad is bright enough to cast deep shadows on the stately Victorian mansion, but not to chase away an air of sadness.

22. The painting expresses Edward Hopper’s central theme: the alienation of modern life. • Instead of happy, anecdotal pictures celebrating the energy and prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, Hopper portrayed modern life with unsentimental scenes of either physical or psychological isolation.

23. Most are set in the city, where people often look uncomfortable and out of place.

24. Others, like House by the Railroad, picture solitary buildings in commonplace landscapes. • Hopper’s House by the Railroadis symbolic of the loss that is felt when modern progress leaves an agrarian society behind.

25. The single focus of the painting is a large gray house in an imported French style.

26. Although Hopper customarily worked from life, he invented this house based on some he came across in New England and others he may have seen on Paris boulevards. • This architectural style became fashionable in America during the mid-nineteenth century.

27. Its hallmark is a double-pitched roof pierced with dormer windows that give height and light to the attic level. • From this we might assume that the once-grand Victorian house in Hopper’s painting had been built for a large family with the means to construct a residence in the latest style.

28. If to our eyes these antique features lend the house a certain charm, in Hopper’s time it would have appeared a clumsy relic from an awkward era—“an ugly house,” as one critic phrased it, “in an ugly place.”

29. Like the house, the site once may have been more attractive. • The tall, hooded windows must have overlooked a landscape; • The double veranda and tower were presumably positioned to take advantage of a view, probably over miles of lush countryside.

30. Now the many windows appear tightly closed, with shades mostly drawn, as if they have become obsolete for a landscape that holds little to admire.

31. It is possible that the house • has been deserted; • In any event, nature’s absence is also pronounced, similar to the industrial scene in Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape

32. House by the Railroad might even be considered the domestic complement to Sheeler’s work, • although Hopper seems not to have felt Sheeler’s contradictory attitude toward modern life.

33. Whether he regarded the house as lastingly beautiful or hopelessly old-fashioned, Hopper presents it as an enduring emblem of the past.

34. The two themes of modern progress and historical continuity come together in the second man-made feature of the painting, • A railroad track running so close to the house that a passing train would have rattled its windows.

35. From our curiously low viewpoint, the track appears to slice through the lower edge of the structure—or, to regard it in a different way, to become part of the house itself, a new foundation for American life.

36. An enduring sign of progress, the railroad was the primary agent of industrial change.

37. It enlarged existing cities and created new ones on the frontier.

38. It also provided Americans with unprecedented mobility, allowing them to explore other regions of the country.

39. But as Albert Bierstadt observed in the previous century, the railroad came at the cost of the American wilderness.

40. Even earlier in the nineteenth century, Thomas Cole had considered the consequences of American migration from the early settlements on the East Coast. • As The Oxbow suggests, a well-tended countryside held practical and aesthetic advantages but forever altered the unspoiled landscape that was America’s pride.

41. Hopper rejected European influences, maintaining that American art should capture the character of the nation.

42. Like Cole and Bierstadt, he expresses the tension between nature and culture.

43. Although railroad tracks are typically associated with the noise, speed, and rapid change of modern life, this scene is curiously still and silent, as if the rush of industrialization has passed it by.

44. Hopper, working in the period between the two world wars, appears to have found little to celebrate in the urbanization of America, which had destroyed its original, pastoral aspect.

45. Here, the railroad track is the color of earth, taking the place of the stream, valley, or farmland that once formed the background of American culture.

46. Hopper continued to work in this style for the rest of his life, refining and purifying it but never abandoning its basic principles. • Most of his paintings portray scenes in New York or New England, both country and city scenes, all with a spare, homely quality—deserted streets, half-empty theaters, gas stations, railroad tracks, rooming houses. • One of his best-known works, Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.

47. One of his best-known works, Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.

48. Nighthawks c. 1942

49. Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop art.