Birth Year : 1882
Death Year : 1967
Country : US
Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York. Between 1900 and 1905, he
studied art at the Chase School in New York under Chase, Miller, and Henri.
He became a late follower of the Ashcan School and worked with a fairly
dark and somber palette. After a stay in Paris in 1906-7, he returned to
the United States with a considerably lighter and brighter palette. Hopper
exhibited with the Independents in 1910 and at the Armory Show in 1913,
where he sold his first oil painting. Between 1915 and 1923, he worked
as an etcher and commercial artist, for he sold nothing more until a show
of watercolors in 1923 established him well enough for him to devote himself
to painting in oils in the finished and highly personal style from which
he never deviated. Hopper belongs to the group of American realists that
includes Charles Burchfield, Thomas Hart Benton,
and John Steuart Curry.
His subject is America at its most everyday and ordinary: to his specific
motifs-old houses, city and village streets, diners, lighthouses, movie
theatres-he adds a characteristic romanticism. His work has a dreamlike
quality and hints of the wish for something extraordinary that is also
found in the heroes and heroines of Sinclair Lewis' early novels: his paintings
are as stark as Main Street. He achieves this dream quality by his use
of lighting, sometimes fading, sometimes spotlighted, sometimes contrasting
clarity and darkness of effect. Life may be drab, but it retains the memory
of, or the hope for, excitement and poetry. Hopper's recognition came late,
but it included honorary university degrees and the Gold Medal of the National
Institute of Science and Letters, as well as acceptance by both the public
and critics.
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Edward
Hopper
Chop
Suey
Edward
Hopper
Nighthawks
Edward
Hopper
Rooms
by the Sea
Edward
Hopper
Lighthouse
and Buildings, Portland Head
Edward
Hopper
Nighthawks
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