Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter
American art: George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois, C. K.”Chat” Chatterton, Walter Tittle and some, such as the poet Vachel Lindsay and the actor Clifton Webb, who accepted their lack of drawing talent to become icons in the world of letters and the theatre.
With an eye to paying the bills, commercial illustration and its practical applications still claimed a part of Hopper’s training. His studies included classes with illustrators Arthur Keller and Frank Vincent Du Mond. He still envied the great commercial illustrators of his time and their ability to capture life on a page.
By the turn of the century, Impressionism had engulfed Europe with its gauzy, filmy play of light by the likes of Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, and Degas contrasted with the substantial shapes of Manet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. As Chase sent Hopper and his classmates to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Edouard Manet, so did Hopper’s next great influence, Robert Henri, who began teaching at the New York School of Art in 1902.
Henri sought to create a more rounded approach to the teaching process by including reading and discussion of writers in his drawing classes. Hopper, the chronic reader, was enthralled by Henri’s shift of creative priorities. As Chase had preached art for art’s sake, Henri stressed art for life’s sake.
Hopper’s nude studies under Henri’s tutelage between 1902 and 1904 reflect the models as solid shapes formed by light and shadow rather than linear creatures floating in their space. They have no identity in their faces, but each body is architecturally supported, its light-modulated surfaces yielding to gravity and individuality in every plane.
One by one, Hopper carved out these studies and one by one they received Henri’s red daub of paint in the corner as a sign of approval. By 1905, Hopper had rejected Chase’s still-lifes, his showboating lectures to the entire class from a hapless student’s easel. Henri spoke quietly to each artist, his words to their ears. His demands that the students look beyond the confines of the studio to their own worlds produced some of Hopper’s most predictive works from 1904 to 1906. These vertical compositions showing snapshots of country scenes presage Hopper’s future minimalist approach, his highly contrasting use of light and shade to block in the forms and sweeten with eye-catching details. They lack, however, the maturity of his later work with these subjects.
But Hopper became a star student, winning a scholarship in life drawing and first prize in oil painting during one of the school’s competitions. His education was spurred on throughout 1903 and 1904 by these prizes and the adulation that led to his teaching Saturday classes in life drawing, composition, sketching, and painting.
By 1905, Edward Hopper looked out of his framed self-portraits from deep blue eyes shaded by uncompromising brows, down a well-shaped but not over-large nose. The mouth, however, begins to tell the story. It is a petulant mouth stretched wide with the thin upper lip pressed against a demanding, insistent slab of a lower lip. He saw himself without flattery and stamped the canvas with an implacable image. His restless and relentless nature drove him in many directions.
He began taking commercial illustration jobs to earn money part-time, producing some commercial work, but his heart wasn’t in it. He had been a student for seven years and had amassed a considerable body of knowledge that now needed application. While his technique had been improved and refined with a variety of media, his way of thinking about art had been profoundly affected. He now needed to know if his own personality, the sum of his experience, could be translated to the painted surface and find an audience. He searched for a motivational jump-start to his yearning to be a fine artist, a painter in the grand manner.
Paris, Impressionists, and True Love
In October 1906 Hopper chose the route most travelled by artists at that time, a journey to Paris, the world’s cultural shrine. At the age of twenty-four, the tall boy from Nyack, New York went off to see the City of Light. In that same month, as Hopper embarked for the French capital, Paul Cézanne died, his work only attracting attention in his later years. Of the mighty band of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters who had stood the art world on its ear, only Edgar Degas remained. He lived on in Paris, virtually blind, creating clay sculptures by touch. The public was unaware of him until after his death in 1917.
Les Lavoirs à Pont Royal (Wash Boats at the Pont Royal), 1907.
Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 88.3 × 4.4 cm (framed).
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Le Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 74 × 86.7 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
But Paris had become the meeting place and young men – and some persistent young women – their paint boxes and folding easels crowding the banks of the Seine and its bridges, the Latin Quarter, and Montparnasse. They crowded the tables at the Dôme restaurant and Moulin Rouge. Prostitutes flourished. Pimps thrived and many young artists traded their talent for cheap wine and absinthe, leaning back on wire-backed chairs, clustered around café tables littered with glassware and small saucers soiling paper table covers scratched with scribbled graffiti that would come to nothing.
Automobiles chugged and popped on spoked wheels announcing themselves with bulb-horns hooting at crossings. They added exhaust and the aroma of burning castor oil to the million chimneypots that sent charcoal and wood smoke into the miasma that hung above the city. All the while, horse droppings littered the streets.
Pissoires (urinals) and sewage wagons added their fragrance to each early morning, almost overwhelming the smell of freshly-baked baguettes in carts, hurried from bakeries to restaurants to be eaten before they turned to hard crumbly bird food. Paris was a rich stew of action, smells, and grand architecture thickened with islands of leisured timelessness utterly foreign to any American brimming with the need to succeed.
On 24 October, Edward Hopper arrived at a Baptist mission at 48 rue de Lille, the Eglise Evangélique Baptiste run by a Mrs Louise Jammes, a widow who lived with two teenage sons. The New York Hoppers knew her through their church. As soon as Edward could manage, he applied a base of gesso to some 15 × 9 inch wood panels and set out with his paints and brushes. The colours in his box reflected the darker tones he had worked with under Henri’s tutelage in New York: umbers, siennas, browns, greys, creams, cerulean blue. His eye immediately sought out the juxtaposition of geometric shapes.
Shafts and strikes of light on surfaces gave the images depth and a dynamic of expectancy. Where there were no people, it seemed as if someone had just stepped away from a window or the last of a crowd had just passed along the deserted bridge. After years of drawing from models at school and rendering gay young people for his commercial illustration jobs, people vanished from his work except as distant compositional objects – mere dabs of the brush or people-shaped objects.
On balance, when he was not painting in oils, he sketched the denizens of the Paris streets and created a collection of watercolour caricatures from the demi-monde and the lower depths of French society. These character types were not new to him. Whilst at school, he rented a small studio on 14th Street. Prostitutes patrolled that area with insouciant assurance.
In his letters home Hopper mentioned the grace of the French women and the stunted appearance of the men. After the grimy chaos of New York, however, Paris seemed clean and inviting. Dressed in his tailored suit, shirt, and tie, and topped with a straw boater when weather permitted, he spent much time wandering in the parks, down the tree-lined paths of the Jardin des Tuileries, listening to bands play in the gazebos and watching children sail their boats in the fountain. While the Hoppers’ home life had maintained a placid surface, and displaying emotions in public had been frowned upon, Paris must have seemed like an open candy store to the repressed young artist.
Le Pont des Arts, 1907.
Oil on canvas, 59.5 × 73 cm.
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
Hopper