No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

Edward Hopper

New York Movie 1939

Edward Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, to a prosperous dry-goodsmerchant in Nyack, New York, a small town on the Hudson about twenty-five miles north of New York City. He enrolled in the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York in 1900; he transferred to the New York School of Art the next year, and it was here that he studied with legendary teachers William Merritt Chase, Robert Henri, and Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Hopper visited Europe three times between 1906 and 1910, and while he was a life-long Francophile, he never went abroad again. In 1913 he moved to Greenwich Village, renting the top floor apartment at 3 Washington Square North. This would be his home for the rest of his life.

Until the age of 40, Hopper’s career was marked by disappointment. He only sold one painting, and was rarely able to get into gallery shows. He supported himself through commercial illustration—which he loathed—and printmaking, which won him critical recognition.

Hopper’s breakthrough came in 1923 when the Brooklyn Museum bought his watercolor The Mansard Roof for $100. The following year he married fellow painter Josephine Nivison and began showing his work with prominent New York art dealer Frank Rehn. Solo shows made Hopper’s reputation: his oils and watercolors sold well, and critics applauded his quiet realism, use of light, and above all, his ability to reveal beauty in the most mundane subjects.

In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art gave Hopper his first retrospective exhibition. The exhibition included many of his signature subjects: Victorian houses, New York restaurants, automats, drugstores, and bridges, as well as views into quiet, middle-class apartments. Also in the exhibition were paintings from his summer travels to Gloucester, Maine and after 1930, from Truro on Cape Cod. In 1934, he and his wife Jo built a house in Truro where they spent almost every summer.

Although Hopper continued to travel, his best-known works came from his solitary wanderings in New York City. These include Early Sunday Morning, which shows Greenwich Village shop fronts before people filled the streets, and Nighthawks, an image of a diner late at night.

Hopper died at the age 84, and during his long career saw the rise of many different avant-garde moments, including Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art. Despite the popularity of these styles, he remained esteemed by critics and the public. In 1950, the Whitney Museum gave him a major retrospective and he was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1956. In 1967, the year of his death, he represented the United States in the prestigious Sao Paolo Biennal.

In 1971, his wife bequeathed more than 3,000 of his works to the Whitney Museum, which has since staged many important and critically acclaimed exhibitions of his work. While reviewing of these exhibitions, novelist John Updike referred to Hopper’s work as “calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic,” a description that remains true today.

http://www.mfa.org/hopper/artist.html

The only real influence I’ve ever had was myself.

Edward Hopper

Rooms by the Sea  1951

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. In both his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hopper

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

Summer Interior 1909

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.

Edward Hopper has something of the lonely gravity peculiar to Thomas Eakins, a courageous fidelity to life as he feels it to be. He also shares Winslow Homer’s power to recall the feel of things. For Hopper, this feel is insistently low-key and ruminative. He shows the modern world unflinchingly; even its gaieties are gently mournful, echoing the disillusionment that swept across the country after the start of the Great Depression in 1929. Cape Cod Evening (1939; 77 x 102 cm (30 1/4 x 40 in)) should be idyllic, and in a way it is. The couple enjoy the evening sunshine outside their home, yet they are a couple only technically and the enjoyment is wholly passive as both are isolated and introspective in their reveries. Their house is closed to intimacy, the door firmly shut and the windows covered. The dog is the only alert creature, but even it turns away from the house. The thick, sinister trees tap on the window panes, but there will be no answer.

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

Edward Hopper

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.
Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and 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. He made three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism. He was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore, 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.
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. In 1925 he painted House by the Railroad, a landmark in American art that marked the advent of his mature style. 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.
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, shows an all-night café, its few uncommunicative customers illuminated in the pitiless glare of electric lights.
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. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City.

http://www.mcs.csuhayward.edu/~malek/Hopper.htm