Edward Hopper, American Realist

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The well-known American realist of the inter-war period Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, NY, in 1882 into a solid middle class family.
Starting 1899 he studied at the New York School of Illustrating, and then at the New York School of Art. He worked under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, one of the fathers of American Realism. Hopper continued his study in Paris in 1906. He also visited Berlin, Brussels, London and Amsterdam. He had his first solo exhibition in 1920, but didn't sell anything. In 1923 he settled in Greenwich Village, the following year he married Jo Nivison who would modelled for all the female figures in his paintings.

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Hopper's second solo show in 1924 was a sell-out. The Hoppers travelled widely within the United States and to Mexico, as they were now rich enough to buy a car.

"Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate Pop Art. Hopper once said: 'To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're travelling.' "Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists", by Edward Lucie-Smith.

He died in 1967, isolated if not forgotten, and Jo Hopper died ten months later. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death."

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