Edward Hopper's Houses

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

Best known today for his paintings of lonely figures in New York interiors, Edward Hopper also painted watercolors of nineteenth-century houses in serene, sunlit landscapes. He grew up in Nyack, New York, in a house built in the 1850s by his grandfather and was drawn to American vernacular architecture, often using houses to represent peoples' lives.

Painting pictures of old houses was a curious choice for a pupil of Robert Henri (1865-1929), who urged his students to look to contemporary life for their subjects. But Hopper's few early attempts at New York street scenes were only marginally successful. Instead, like the painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), the novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947), and the poet Robert Frost (1874-1965), he was more strongly impelled by what the critic and writer Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) called a search for a "usable past"(1) than by the energy of contemporary life. Like Benton, who said he wanted to paint "a people's history"(2) when he began his American Historical Epic (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri) in 1919, and like Cather in her 1918 novel My Antonia about a new immigrant's struggle to survive in the American Midwest, Hopper turned to small incidents and the people who brought the past alive. For him, as for Frost, whom he greatly admired, the simple beauties of the land and the compassion and commitment of ordinary people offered emotional sustenance within the rapidly shifting currents of American life.

In 1923 Hopper went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a bustling fishing port and artists' colony about thirty miles north of Boston. There he renewed his acquaintance with Josephine Verstille Nivison (1885-1968), a painter from New York who had also studied with Henri, and to whom he was married the following year. The two shared a love of French poetry and both painted watercolors of the houses of the ship captains, maritime merchants, and Italian immigrants who had come to Gloucester to fish the waters off Cape Ann.

Hopper turned forty-one in the summer of 1923, yet despite his efforts and those of his friends, he had sold only one painting (from the Armory Show in 1913), and still made his living as an illustrator. The large annual exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other cities that attracted hundreds of entries rarely accepted Hopper's submissions, and in truth he had attempted few major compositions. Apart from oil sketches of the coast of Monhegan island in Maine and a group of very competent etchings, Hopper had little to show for the decade and a half since he had finished art school.

After his summer in Gloucester in 1923, he sent six watercolors to a show at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. The critic Royal Cortissoz described them as "exhilarating,"(3) and the museum bought The Mansard Roof (Pl. II) for its collection. The following year Hopper returned to Gloucester, and at summer's end he approached Frank K. M. Rehn, who immediately offered him a show in his New York City gallery. When the exhibition closed several weeks later, Rehn had sold everything. Overnight, museums and collectors sought out Hopper's watercolors.

Haskell's House (Pl. III) depicts a hilltop Victorian mansion overlooking the busy wharves of Gloucester harbor. To capture this view Hopper stood across the street, just downhill from the pedestrian whose diminutive size contrasts with the commanding presence of the house. The utility poles along the busy commercial thoroughfare reinforce the physical and psychological distance between the nineteenth-century facade and the viewer. Here and elsewhere Hopper manipulated the viewpoint to express a complex dialogue between the past and the present. Rather than adjusting or eliminating elements, Hopper used a specific vantage point to establish his, and our, physical position vis-a-vis the subject. In this way he coaxes us to acknowledge relationships we would not have recognized on our own.

In Haskell's House Hopper turned his back on the busy harbor that inspired John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and many other New York painters who annually traded the heat of the city for the ocean breezes of Gloucester. As Hopper later wrote:

At Gloucester, when everyone else would be painting ships and the waterfront, I'd just go fish around looking at houses. It is a solid-looking town. The roof are very bold, the cornices bolder...The sea captain influence I guess - the boldness of ships.(4)

In Rocks at the Fort (Pl. I) Hopper not only chose an unexpected viewpoint but also an unusual subject - laundry fluttering in the wind behind the houses of immigrant fishermen. Around the turn of this century a number of Sicilian-born fishermen arrived in Gloucester and settled in a part of the town called the Fort. Contemporary accounts described them as hardworking men who set out to fish at dawn. Their wives and children spent the evenings straightening lines and baiting hooks for the next day at sea. The widely read Fishing Gazette reported on December 5, 1908, that the Italians