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3. Le Louvre et la Seine, 1907. Oil on canvas, 59.8 × 72.7 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

4. Le Pont Royal, 1909. Oil on canvas, 60.9 × 73.6 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

On 22 July 1882, Edward Hopper emerged into the middling-size prosperous town of Nyack, New York on the Hudson River. His mother, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper, was of English and Welsh stock, while his father, Garrett Henry Hopper, came from generations of English and Dutch ancestors. The elder Hopper tried his hand at sales and finally opened a dry goods store that failed to achieve any great success. Edward was the second child in the family, arriving two years after his sister, Marion.

While Hopper senior toiled amid bolts of cloth, cards of buttons and celluloid collars, Edward’s mother kept her son and daughter supplied with creative tools targeting the theatre and art. An early prized possession for young Edward was a slate blackboard and chalk. He could draw and erase with impunity, but any particularly satisfying result lacked permanence. He began sketching and painting early, taking his sketchbook with him on frequent treks into the nearby countryside.

The Hopper home at 82 North Broadway belonged to Elizabeth’s widowed mother, Martha Griffiths Smith, and was the site of Liz and Garrett’s marriage in 1879. It was a rambling two-storey white frame house sheltered by trees and punctured by shuttered windows beneath deep-set eaves, decorated with cornices and belted with a corner porch across the front. To Edward, this place with its dark windows that revealed nothing of the lives lived inside represented home, personal solitude and a refuge during his early years. Its counterparts would appear repeatedly in his future paintings.

The fact that his father could not afford to move their family into a house of their own had to affect Edward’s Victorian childhood during which men were expected to be the sole providers. His Grandmother Smith not only owned the house but also claimed the moral high ground in the community where her father, The Reverend Joseph W. Griffiths, had started up the Nyack Baptist Church back in 1854. The female side of the Hopper family provided for the family needs through rents and mortgage payments on other Nyack properties.

Edward and his older sister Marion attended private schools and came home to rooms cleaned by an Irish maid, and delivery boys bringing groceries and other purchases bought on account in town. His grades were above average throughout high school. One of his favourite subjects was French, which he studied and learned well enough to be able to read throughout his life.

At a time when the average grown man’s height reached five feet eight inches, young Hopper at twelve years old already towered at six feet. He seemed to be all arms and legs, causing his friends to nickname him “Grasshopper”. He loved jokes at other people’s expense and often raged when he did not win at games. Many friends remembered his teasing, an annoying and persistent character flaw that stayed with him, often with a sadistic edge, into adulthood. Naturally shy, he peered over the heads of his classmates and always ended up in the back row in photographs.

Hopper spent puberty and adolescence wandering along the bank of a nearby lake where ice was harvested in the winter, sketching people, boats and landscapes. Yacht building flourished in Nyack and the boat docks along the river became hangouts for Edward and his friends. They formed the Boys’ Yacht Club and piloted their sailboats with varying degrees of expertise. From those days, Edward carried with him a love of boats and the sea that lasted the rest of his life.

5. River Boat, 1909. Oil on canvas, 96.3 × 122.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

The railway had arrived along with electric light, paved streets and changed the complexion of the town, bringing more traffic, small businesses and a mostly Irish immigrant population. Elegant Victorian houses along the Hudson River belonged to wealthy industrial barons whose Dutch ancestors had amassed fortunes. His world was an idyllic boy’s world at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Hopper’s religious education in the Baptist Bible School was at odds with the freedoms of adolescence. He absorbed teachings on the rewards of a frugal life style and the righteous need to step back from the gratifications of lust and sex and other “immoral behaviour”. Baptists had a strong belief in the hickory switch for bad conduct, but Edward, it seems, was rarely punished for his misdeeds. He was the young prince, the talented untouchable. Yet, his personality developed inward as if ashamed of his ascension in the face of his father’s second-class situation within the upper middle-class success of the matriarchal Smith clan. This reticence and retreat into long silences later evolved into bouts of depression when his self-perceived skills failed him and the armour of his ego no longer appeared to sustain his ambition. Already he had developed a placid mask to hide behind and contain the demons of perceived inadequacy that dogged his career.

If Garrett Hopper bequeathed any legacy to his son, it was the love of reading. While the elder Hopper struggled with his business books and accounts, he was at home in his library with shelves groaning under English, French and Russian classic literature. Great social changes were occurring during the “Gay 90s” and the replacement of Victorian religious rigour by Edwardian free-thinking. From Turgenev to Victor Hugo and Tolstoy, Edward fled into books to discover words for the feelings that he could not disclose. He adopted his father’s bookish salvation as a retreat and chose his most trusted friends from pages, not from life. Their quotes – often spoken aloud – became his surrogate responses.

By 1895, Hopper’s natural talent was obvious in his technically well-executed oils. He relished details in his meticulous drawings of navy ships and the carefully-observed rigging of the racing yachts built in Nyack shipyards. He always came back to the sea and shore throughout his life, back to the big sky continuously redrawing itself in white on blue from opal pale to dangerous cerulean, and the surf-shaped rocks fronting long sweeps of dunes topped by hissing grasses. By 1899 he had finished high school and looked toward the big city down the Hudson, the centre of American art.

Hopper’s mother saw to it that Edward and Marion were exposed to art in books, magazines, prints and illustrations. She spent a considerable sum on pencils, paints, chalks, sketch pads, watercolour paper, brushes and ink pens. While Marion preferred to pursue theatrical drama, Edward practised various art techniques, watching how light gave or robbed objects of dimension and how line contained shapes and directed the eye. He went to school copying weekly magazine covers created by the great illustrators of the time: Edwin Austin Abbey, Charles Dana Gibson, Gilbert Gaul and the sketches of Old Masters: Rembrandt and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

Hopper absorbed all the fine examples and still retained a sense of humour as a safety valve to release some of the high expectations under pressure. His cartoons and lampoons remained with him as age further hardened his face to the world. Often they represented deeply felt emotions, but were tossed off with a laugh so as not to draw attention to the man behind the pencil.

6. Ile Saint-Louis, 1909. Oil on canvas, 59.6 × 72.8 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

7. Après-Midi de juin or L’Après-Midi de printemps, 1907. Oil on canvas, 59.7 × 73 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

With his father’s practical approval and his mother’s profession-oriented encouragement, he decided to pursue a career as a commercial illustrator and enrolled in the New York School of Illustrating at 114 West 34th St.

Magazine and graphic poster illustration was in its “golden period” at the turn of the century. The mechanics of printing had embraced the photographic method of transferring the finished drawing to the printing plate with a half-tone screen. This reducing of the illustration to a series of dots allowed flexible sizing to any page dimension or cropping requirement. Freedom to employ a variety of media gave the artist a broad scope of interpretation.

Since there were so many magazines, advertisements, posters and stories to be illustrated, good illustrators who met deadlines and were literate enough to capture the core idea for the image were in great demand. There was good money in illustration. Publications and corporations who coupled their public identity to the work of these men prized those artists who reached the top rank. And it was a man’s world. Regardless of talent, women were rarely accepted into the illustration schools. A woman’s creative energies were best focused on producing happy, well-behaved children and a suitable home life for her husband. Their art was a hobby, a dabble, a device to keep idle hands busy. Edward Hopper was all right with that.

Enrolled on a monthly basis, he commuted daily from Nyack to New York, working in the classroom and at home on “practice sheets” devised by the school’s “dean,” Charles Hope Provost. These learn-by-rote copy sheets, originally designed as a correspondence school teaching aid, catered to the widest possible spectrum of would-be talent in order to corral the most tuitions. Hopper had already spent time after high school copying illustrations of his favourite artists and churning out original sketches of characters and scenes from literature. After a year of Provost’s shallow instruction, Hopper raised his sights to study fine art as well as commercial illustration. His parents agreed to chip in the $15 a month fee and in 1900, his portfolio was impressive enough to be accepted at the New York School of Art where William Merritt Chase held sway.

Chase was a product of the nineteenth-century European academy system. He came from Williamsburg, Indiana, showed early artistic promise and found enough local patronage in St Louis to afford European study. His efforts placed him in the Royal Academy of Munich in 1872. His return to the United States in the late 1870s led art critics, reviewers and trend prognosticators to suggest he would become one of the great American painters. They were to be disappointed.

Chase’s style was entrenched in European realism and his subjects lacked an “American” flavour. As the moral climate shifted toward a more uplifting fiction, away from the low and gritty reality of the late nineteenth-century American scene, so he shifted to the pose of the flâneur, a French term for a detached observer of life. Chase painted from life, but a moral, uplifting, civilised life that appealed to upper class art buyers and art students anxious to sell. His lessons in composition and his flawless technique were valuable to many of his students who went on to eclipse him: Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper.

Another instructor who crossed Hopper’s path was the young Kenneth Hayes Miller. While teaching at the New York school, Miller was developing his painting style that matured in the early 1920s. His lush urban paintings were referred to by one contemporary critic as an “attempt to make Titian feel at home on 14th Street and crowd Veronese into a department store.”[2]

He also pursued nineteenth-century painting tradition by giving weight and substance to his characters through a build-up of a layered pigment impasto beneath thin glazes of colour. Because Miller’s subjects favoured the reality of the streets, Hopper preferred Miller to Chase’s more refined fiction still rooted in the European academy.

By the time young Edward rose each day in Nyack for the train ride to Hoboken and the ferry trip to New York, he was a home-grown, virtually self-taught raw talent looking for direction. That talent quickly swept him to the head of Chase’s illustration class where he confronted live models in costume and the heady excitement of “fitting in” with a roomful of working artists. His classmates were a rowdy lot of young men filled with pent up energy and looking for relief from the hours spent examining how a shadow moulds the shape of a cheek or working the edge of a charcoal stick to perfectly follow the swell of the model’s thigh just above the knee. As the concentration was intense so was the release.

Many of these “boys” would become icons in the world of American art: George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois, C. K.”Chat” Chatterton, Walter Tittle and some, such as the poet Vachel Lindsay and the actor, Clifton Webb, who accepted their lack to drawing talent to become icons in the world of letters and the theatre. Hopper’s pranks and teasing blended with the male atmosphere. His dry humour came in bursts and left its mark on those it touched. His original timidity hidden behind a substantial wall of reserve began to fade away as he grew more comfortable in the grungy studios where students scraped their palettes clean at the end of the day and left the gobs of colour spread on the walls and decorating the wretched caked and stratified easels.

There were also the “smells” of art: graphite, kneaded erasers, chalk dust, charcoal, linseed oil, glue, sizing, raw wood stretchers and drum-stiff canvas, the piquancy of sweat and turpentine, pig-bristle brushes and Conté crayons, white lead and varnish. The dried crumbs and powdered remnants ground their way into crevices of the easels, straddle boards and overturned chairs used as easels. Drips dried on work aprons, smocks and blotched shoes. This tactile evidence of creation was a tonic that focused the mind and calmed the tremor in the too-early-morning hand.

With an eye to paying the bills, commercial illustration and its practical applications still claimed a part of his training. His studies included classes with illustrators Arthur Keller and Frank Vincent Du Mond. He still envied the great commercial illustrators of his time and their ability to capture life on a page.

By the turn of the century, Impressionism had engulfed Europe with its gauzy, filmy play of light by the likes of Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, and Degas contrasted with the substantial shapes of Manet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. As Chase sent Hopper and his classmates to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Edouard Manet, so did Hopper’s next great influence, Robert Henri, who began teaching at the New York School of Art in 1902.

Henri (pronounced hen-RYE) studied in France under the slick technician and master of the romantic allegory, William Adolphe Bouguereau. Henri bolted from the trompe-l’œil style of meticulous rendition to the looser, broad stroke technique of the Post-Impressionists. He also sought to create a more rounded approach to the teaching process by including reading and discussion of writers in his drawing classes. Hopper, the chronic reader, was enthralled by Henri’s shift of creative priorities. As Chase had preached art for art’s sake, Henri stressed art for life’s sake.

8. Les Lavoirs à Pont Royal, 1907. Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 88.3 × 4.4 cm (framed). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

9. Ecluse de la Monnaie, 1909. Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 73.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

10. Le Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1907. Oil on canvas, 74 × 86.7 × 2.5 cm (framed). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

“Henri’s class was the seat of sedition among the young,” wrote Guy du Bois. Vachel Lindsay noted Henri demanded “…force, likeness and expression” in the students’ portraits.[3]

Hopper’s nude studies under Henri’s tutelage between 1902 and 1904 reflect the models as solid shapes formed by light and shadow rather than linear creatures floating in their space. They have no identity in their faces, but each body is architecturally supported, its light-modulated surfaces yielding to gravity and individuality in every plane.

One by one, Hopper carved out these studies and one by one they received Henri’s red daub of paint in the corner as a sign of approval. By 1905, Hopper had rejected Chase’s still-lifes, his showboating lectures to the entire class from a hapless student’s easel. Henri spoke quietly to each artist, his words to their ears. His demands that the students look beyond the confines of the studio to their own worlds produced some of Hopper’s most predictive works from 1904 to 1906. These vertical compositions showing snapshots of country scenes presage Hopper’s future minimalist approach, his high contrast use of light and deep shadow to block up masses and sweeten with eye-catching details. They lack, however, the maturity of his later work with these subjects.

Robert Henri’s style of intense and personal criticism of student work, his engaging the artists to use their intellect as well as their brushes and paints, and his ruthless culling of unsuccessful attempts with two slashes of paint across the offending work made his sought-after praise even more valued. As for Henri’s own painting skills, Hopper was a bit more sparing in his praise: “Henri wasn’t a very good painter, at least I don’t think so. He was a better teacher than a painter.”[4]

But Hopper became a star student, winning a scholarship in life drawing and first prize in oil painting during one of the school’s concours competitions. His education was spurred on throughout 1903 and 1904 by these prizes and the adulation that led to his teaching Saturday classes in life drawing, composition, sketching and painting.

By 1905 Edward Hopper looked out of his framed self-portraits from deep blue eyes shaded by uncompromising brows, down a well-shaped but not over-large nose. The mouth, however, begins to tell the story. It is a petulant mouth stretched wide with the thin upper lip pressed against a demanding, insistent slab of a lower lip. He saw himself without flattery and stamped the canvas with an implacable image. His restless and relentless nature drove him in many directions.

He began taking commercial illustration jobs to earn money on a part-time basis for the C. C. Phillips and Company Advertising Agency at 24 East 22nd Street. Student Coles Phillips founded the agency that lasted for a year until he closed it to freelance as an independent illustrator. Hopper produced some commercial work, but his heart wasn’t in it. He had been a student for seven years and had amassed a considerable body of knowledge that now needed application. He had enjoyed instruction and praise from teachers who were polar opposites of each other.

While his technique had been improved and refined with a variety of media, his thinking about art had been profoundly affected. He now needed to know if his own personality, the sum of his experience, could be translated to the painted surface and find an audience. He searched for a motivational jump-start to his yearning to be a fine artist, a painter in the grand manner.