Edward Hopper's Houses

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1999 by Virginia M. Mecklenburg

live on bread and water until they money enough to buy a gasoline engine for their boat, after which the inaugurate a regular business....A bigger success on a small scale never appeared in the harbor.(5)

In February 1927 Rehn held a second show of Hoppers work, which was again a critical and financial success. The proceeds allowed the Hoppers to buy a car, a used Dodge, in which they traveled early the next summer to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, just south of Portland. There he painted several views of the eastern lighthouse at Two Lights and in each showed the adjacent houses of the lighthouse keepers. The eastern beacon had been electrified in 1925. The preceding year the kerosene light of the western lighthouse had been extinguished by the federal government, which, during the 1920s, shut down one beacon of each twin lighthouse along the eastern seaboard.(6) In Light at Two Lights (Pl. IV) the gingerbread trim of the keeper's house lends a decorative note to the jumble of sheds and passageways that linked the house and the beacon. In Hill and Houses (PI. VI) Hopper depicted the houses of the lighthouse keepers Captain Berry at the crest of the hill and Captain Upton in the foreground. The serene landscape belies the dangerous lives the keepers and surfmen led: rescuing survivors from the many wrecks off the Maine coast required courage and fortitude.(7)

Hopper again affirmed the courage of these men in Bill Latham's House (Pl. V). William W. Latham was a former schooner captain who had weathered hurricanes and a shipwreck and subsequently became a surfman at the local Coast Guard station in the cove below Two Lights. Latham had retired just months before the Hoppers arrived in Cape Elizabeth.(8) Like many of the lighthouse keepers, the surfmen were local citizens. They lived at the Coast Guard station during the fall, winter, and spring, when heavy weather could be expected. In June and July many of them worked as farmers or fishermen while remaining on call for emergencies. A historian of Cape Elizabeth has written of the surfmen:

Every day, weather permitting, they would don foul weather gear and life jackets, launch their surfboat, and spend a few hours of practice at the sweeps. The surfboats were 27 foot, self-bailing, double enders; virtually unsinkable and uncapsizable. In addition, frequent drills with Lyle-gun and breeches buoy were carried on. At night a coast watch was maintained in four-hour shifts....Needless to say, it took a man of unusual stamina to face the subzero cold and howling gails of the winter months in keeping this constant vigil.(9)

In Bill Latham's House Hopper adjusted the vantage point to create a dynamic link between viewer and subject. The softness of the dry grass and the spiky tree limbs bridge the space between the house and the observer, even as the fence assures Latham's privacy and reminds us of the psychological distance between his life and ours.

Several miles north of Two Lights, at the entrance to Portland Harbor, stands Portland Head Light (see Pl. VII). Commissioned by Congress during the presidency of George Washington, it was illuminated in January 1791 and is the oldest lighthouse in Maine. When Hopper painted the light and outbuildings it was the home of Joseph Strout and his family. Strout's father, Joshua Strout, went to sea at the age of eleven and became a captain. A fall from the mast of his ship forced him ashore, and in 1869 he was made keeper of the Portland Head Light. He lost three sons at sea and barely escaped death when a storm sent the fog warning bell crashing to the rocks below the lighthouse. On Christmas Eve 1886 he and Joseph, his fourth son, rescued all eighteen people aboard the Annie C. Maguire when the ship ran aground at the base of the lighthouse. When Joshua Strout retired in 1904 Joseph was appointed to replace him and was still the keeper when the Hoppers arrived in 1927.(10)