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View: Night Shadows - 1921 Edward HopperNationality / Dates: 1882-1967
Edward Hopper was born in 1882 in Nyack, New York, and is recognized as the most important realist painter of 20th-century America. His years of study with Robert Henri at the New York School of Art 1900-06 were most influential and are credited with his allegiance to a purely American style in spite of his European travel from 1906-10. "His intuitive sense of the architectonic and a focusing on large, solid masses and volumes dominated his style throughout his life. By 1913 a mood of quiet melancholy pervades, this too remains and is intensified in later years . . . the emphasis on shapes and angles is in rapport with Hopper's sense of simplicity and grandeur. An enveloping loneliness and eerie quietude is the real subject . . . his representations of city life have a desolate quality often emphasized by the inclusion of anonymous, non-communicating figures."1 In 1924 he married Josephine Verstille Nivison, also a painter; Jo modeled for or provided the inspiration for all the figures in Hopper's early work. She kept meticulous records of the work done by him; they had no children. He died in New York in 1967. |
