Edward Hopper
The painter of American loneliness.
Edward Hopper painted petrol stations, diners and hotel rooms where people sit alone. Nighthawks is his best-known picture.
Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, a small town on the Hudson River north of New York. He studied at the New York School of Art, where the painter Robert Henri was his most important teacher. Between 1906 and 1910 he made three trips to Paris, where he was struck by the light of Impressionism but barely noticed the radical movements.
For many years he struggled to make his name. He earned his living as a commercial artist and illustrator, work he disliked. He sold his first painting at the great Armory Show in New York in 1913, but then ten years passed before he sold the next. In the meantime he made etchings of city subjects.
In 1924 he married the painter Josephine Nivison. She posed for almost all the women in his pictures and kept meticulous records of his works. The same year an exhibition of his watercolours was a success, and he was able to give up illustration.
Hopper’s pictures show petrol stations, diners, hotel rooms, offices and empty streets. The light is harsh and clear, often from the sun or from fluorescent tubes, and people are alone even when they are together. Early Sunday Morning of 1930 is in the Whitney Museum in New York. Nighthawks of 1942, with a few late-night customers in a brightly lit corner diner, is in the Art Institute of Chicago and has become one of the best-known images in American art.
Hopper died in 1967 in his studio on Washington Square in New York. Josephine bequeathed his estate to the Whitney Museum. His pictures have influenced film, including Alfred Hitchcock, and have become symbols of urban loneliness and the silence of modern life.