2. A BIT OF HIS LIFE…
• Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was born in Nyack and lived all his life in New
York. Born into a modest, middle-class family, Hopper’s interest in painting
revealed itself at a very young age. He studied commercial illustration for a
year then enrolled in the painting classes at the New York School of Art.
There Hopper joined the studio of Robert Henri, a teacher who promoted
a realism that focused on the depiction of every day American life. Having
completed his studies Hopper went to Paris where he spent an academic
year, returning there for shorter periods in the future. After that date, he
only left the United States to make a couple of short trips to Mexico.
3. A BIT OF HIS LIFE…
• Hopper worked formany years
as a commercial ilustrator but
from 1918 began to acquire a
reputation as a printmaker. His
Real change of fortunes, howe-
ver, came about in 1925 when
an exhibition of his watercolours at the Rehn Gallery
was completely sold out. This success allowed him to
dedicate himself entirely to painting.
Edward Hopper,
Self-Portrait,
1906
4.
5. HOW HE PAINTED
• Hopper began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark
palette. Then he shifted to the lighter palette of the Impressionists
before returning to the darker palette with which he was
comfortable. Hopper later said, "I got over that and later things
done in Paris were more the kind of things I do now.”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 cubists experiments, Hopper was attracted realist art.
6. HOW HE PAINTED
• Edward Hopper painted American landscapes and cityscapes
with a disturbing truth, expressing the world around him as a
chilling, alienating, and often vacuous place. Everybody in a
Hopper picture appears terribly alone. Hopper soon gained a
widespread reputation as the artist who gave visual form to
the loneliness and boredom of life in the big city. This was
something new in art, perhaps an expression of the sense of
human hopelessness that characterized the Great Depression
of the 1930s.
18. A bit of his life
• Hopper died the 15th of May 1967 in his
studio in NYC near Washington Square. His
wife, who died 10 months later, bequeathed
their joint collection of over three thousand
works to the Whitney Museum of American
Art. He is buried with his wife Jo in the Oak
Hill Cemetery in Nyack, the place where he
was born.
