84 Facts About Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker.

Edward Hopper was praised for "complete verity" in the America he portrayed.

Edward Hopper's career benefited significantly from his marriage to fellow-artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work, both as a life-model and as a creative partner.

Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City.

Edward Hopper was one of two children of a comfortably well-off family.

Edward Hopper's father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.

Edward Hopper was a good student in grade school, and, by the time he was five, his talent with drawing was already apparent.

Edward Hopper readily absorbed his father's intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures.

Edward Hopper's parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books.

Edward Hopper first began signing and dating his drawings at the age of 10.

Edward Hopper's parents insisted that he study commercial art to have a reliable means of income.

In developing his self-image and individualistic philosophy of life, Edward Hopper was influenced by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Edward Hopper began art studies with a correspondence course in 1899.

Early on, Edward Hopper modeled his style after Chase and French Impressionist masters Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Edward Hopper encouraged them to imbue their work with a modern spirit.

In 1905, Edward Hopper landed a part-time job with an advertising agency, where he created cover designs for trade magazines.

Edward Hopper was bound to it by economic necessity until the mid-1920s.

Edward Hopper temporarily escaped by making three trips to Europe, each centered in Paris, ostensibly to study its art scene.

Edward Hopper began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark palette.

Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, Edward Hopper was attracted to realist art.

In 1912, Edward Hopper traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to seek some inspiration and made his first outdoor paintings in America.

Edward Hopper painted Squam Light, the first of many lighthouse paintings to come.

In 1913, at the Armory Show, Edward Hopper earned $250 when he sold his first painting, Sailing, to an American businessman Thomas F Vietor, which he had painted over an earlier self-portrait.

Edward Hopper was thirty-one, and although he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order, his career would not catch on for many more years.

Edward Hopper continued to participate in group exhibitions at smaller venues, such as the MacDowell Club of New York.

Shortly after his father's death that same year, Edward Hopper moved to the 3 Washington Square North apartment in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, where he would live for the rest of his life.

At an impasse over his oil paintings, in 1915 Edward Hopper turned to etching.

Edward Hopper produced some posters for the war effort, as well as continuing with occasional commercial projects.

When he could, Edward Hopper did some outdoor oil paintings on visits to New England, especially at the art colonies at Ogunquit, and Monhegan Island.

Edward Hopper painted two of his many "window" paintings to come: Girl at Sewing Machine and Moonlight Interior, both of which show a figure near a window of an apartment viewed as gazing out or from the point of view from the outside looking in.

In 1918, Edward Hopper was awarded the US Shipping Board Prize for his war poster, "Smash the Hun".

Edward Hopper participated in three exhibitions: in 1917 with the Society of Independent Artists, in January 1920, and in 1922.

Edward Hopper re-encountered Josephine Nivison, an artist and former student of Robert Henri, during a summer painting trip in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Edward Hopper managed his career and his interviews, was his primary model, and was his life companion.

Edward Hopper always said that his favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house.

Edward Hopper continued to harbor bitterness about his career, later turning down appearances and awards.

Edward Hopper fared better than many other artists during the Great Depression.

Edward Hopper's stature took a sharp rise in 1931 when major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, paid thousands of dollars for his works.

Edward Hopper sold 30 paintings that year, including 13 watercolors.

Edward Hopper was very productive through the 1930s and early 1940s, producing among many important works New York Movie, Girlie Show, Nighthawks, Hotel Lobby, and Morning in a City.

Edward Hopper died of natural causes in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15,1967.

Edward Hopper was buried two days later in the family plot at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York, his place of birth.

Edward Hopper's wife died ten months later and is buried with him.

Edward Hopper's wife bequeathed their joint collection of more than three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Papers and drawings in the Edward Hopper home passed into the keeping of family friend Arthayer Sanborn.

Edward Hopper was someone drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, who "painted short isolated moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion".

Edward Hopper was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy, or detached.

Edward Hopper was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.

Edward Hopper paid particular attention to geometrical design and the careful placement of human figures in proper balance with their environment.

Edward Hopper often made preparatory sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions.

Edward Hopper used saturated color to heighten contrast and create mood.

Edward Hopper derived his subject matter from two primary sources: one, the common features of American life and its inhabitants; and two, seascapes and rural landscapes.

Once Edward Hopper achieved his mature style, his art remained consistent and self-contained, in spite of the numerous art trends that came and went during his long career.

Edward Hopper's seascapes fall into three main groups: pure landscapes of rocks, sea, and beach grass; lighthouses and farmhouses; and sailboats.

Edward Hopper painted the majority of the pure seascapes in the period between 1916 and 1919 on Monhegan Island.

Edward Hopper's The Long Leg is a nearly all-blue sailing picture with the simplest of elements, while his Ground Swell is more complex and depicts a group of youngsters out for a sail, a theme reminiscent of Winslow Homer's iconic Breezing Up.

Edward Hopper expresses the emotions in various environments, including the office, in public places, in apartments, on the road, or on vacation.

Edward Hopper takes the couple theme to a more ambitious level with Excursion into Philosophy.

Jo Edward Hopper noted in their log book, "[T]he open book is Plato, reread too late".

The pensive man in Edward Hopper's painting is positioned between the lure of the earthly domain, figured by the woman, and the call of the higher spiritual domain, represented by the ethereal lightfall.

Edward Hopper is paralysed by the fervent inner labour of the melancholic.

In Office at Night, another "couple" painting, Edward Hopper creates a psychological puzzle.

Several studies for the painting show how Edward Hopper experimented with the positioning of the two figures, perhaps to heighten the eroticism and the tension.

Edward Hopper went on to make several "office" pictures, but no others with a sensual undercurrent.

In keeping with the title of his painting, Edward Hopper later said, Nighthawks has more to do with the possibility of predators in the night than with loneliness.

Originally Edward Hopper intended to put figures in the upstairs windows but left them empty to heighten the feeling of desolation.

Unlike past artists who painted the female nude to glorify the female form and to highlight female eroticism, Edward Hopper's nudes are solitary women who are psychologically exposed.

Girlie Show was inspired by Edward Hopper's visit to a burlesque show a few days earlier.

Edward Hopper did produce a commissioned "portrait" of a house, The MacArthurs' Home, where he faithfully details the Victorian architecture of the home of actress Helen Hayes.

Edward Hopper painted Portrait of Orleans, a "portrait" of the Cape Cod town from its main street.

Jo Edward Hopper confirmed that her husband intended the figures to suggest they are taking their life's last bows together as husband and wife.

Much meaning can be added to a painting by its title, but the titles of Edward Hopper's paintings were sometimes chosen by others, or were selected by Edward Hopper and his wife in a way that makes it unclear whether they have any real connection with the artist's meaning.

In focusing primarily on quiet moments, very rarely showing action, Edward Hopper employed a form of realism adopted by another leading American realist, Andrew Wyeth, but Edward Hopper's technique was completely different from Wyeth's hyper-detailed style.

In league with some of his contemporaries, Edward Hopper shared his urban sensibility with John Sloan and George Bellows but avoided their overt action and violence.

Where Joseph Stella and Georgia O'Keeffe glamorized the monumental structures of the city, Edward Hopper reduced them to everyday geometrics and he depicted the pulse of the city as desolate and dangerous rather than "elegant or seductive".

Once seen, Edward Hopper's interpretations exist in our consciousness in tandem with our own experience.

We forever see a certain type of house as a Edward Hopper house, invested perhaps with a mystery that Edward Hopper implanted in our own vision.

Edward Hopper considered himself more subtle, less illustrative, and certainly not sentimental.

In 1993, Madonna was inspired sufficiently by Edward Hopper's 1941 painting Girlie Show that she named her world tour after it and incorporated many of the theatrical elements and mood of the painting into the show.

In 2004, British guitarist John Squire released a concept album based on Edward Hopper's work entitled Marshall's House.

Edward Hopper's work has influenced multiple recordings by British band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.

The poems each dramatized a Edward Hopper painting, imagining a story behind the scene; the book won the Prix France Culture prize in 1991.

In 2004, a large selection of Edward Hopper's paintings toured Europe, visiting Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and the Tate Modern in London.

New wave band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's 1985 album Crush features artwork inspired by several Edward Hopper paintings, including Early Sunday Morning, Nighthawks and Room in New York.