Edward Hopper. Light and Dark. Gerry Souter

      While Henri’s show at the MacBeth Gallery confounded critics, another show had been in the works since 1906 titled Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists. Installed on the top floor of a building at 43–45 West 42nd Street, the show opened on 9 March to run until 31 March 1908. Created by New York School of Art students Glenn Coleman, Arnold Friedman and Julius Glotz, it featured fifteen artists; one of them was Edward Hopper.

      Though the show purported to present the latest in striving for a “National Art,” Hopper and three other artists showed French paintings. He offered The Louvre and Seine, The Park at St Cloud and Le Pont des Arts. Guy du Bois, Hopper’s friend from school, hung Gaité Montparnasse. Du Bois also became the mouthpiece for the group, using his media contacts to write articles and trumpet the group’s success. He became a particular champion for Hopper over the years in a maturing friendship.

      These young American painters, with Luks, Sloan, Glackens and Shinn at the core, had at last found wall space and were at least being noticed – if only to be ridiculed. They continued to follow Henri’s lead, seeking out gritty urban subject matter in New York and rendering it in the dark palette of colours favoured by Goya, Manet, Velázquez and Frans Hals. Together, the young rebels were dubbed The Ash Can School of American painting. While urban realism was nothing new – Chase had been an urban Realist – the group’s subject matter portrayed the bottom half of the city’s population, the alleys, elevated trains, crowded streets, tenements and steamy waterfronts.

      The subject matter and nature of Hopper’s style abstracted him from the grim and gritty “Ash Can” painters. If critics mentioned him at all, his work was considered with a sniff “…European”. He did, however, shift his interest to more “national” scenes, creating Tramp Steamer (actually a British ship seen crossing the English Channel), The El Station, Railroad Train and Tugboat with Black Smokestack. His palette remained light and he subsequently fell out of favour with Henri. While Hopper disagreed with Henri, he was still drawn to his former teacher’s example of going abroad over the summers. To that end, Hopper avoided late nights drinking with the boys and any living expenses beyond the basics. He cultivated a generally frugal lifestyle that would continue long after his reputation was made.

      In March 1909 Hopper bolted from New York, arrived in Plymouth, England on the 17th, and headed directly for Paris via Cherbourg. Wasting no time, he presented himself at Mme Jammes’ Baptist Mission at 48 rue de Lille. What he found was Mme Jammes near death at the hospital and his rooms in doubt. He was forced to pay money for an hotel room until his lodgings could be sorted out. On 28 April the elderly landlady who had mothered Edward during his first visit and wrote glowing letters to Elizabeth in Nyack about her wonderful “mama’s boy”, died of consumption. MrsJammes’ sons now controlled the fate of Hopper’s lodging. He ingratiated himself by showing up at her interment in the cemetery at Courbevoie, and the sons, in turn, let him keep his room. Edward mentioned her death in his letter home, but only as an obstacle to his convenience.

      He wasted no time and set to work in familiar settings along the Seine and in the nearby French countryside. During this visit, his palette deepened and his brush strokes lost their choppy impressionist quality. Le Pont Royal and Le Pavillon de Flore are more substantial as structures, as is the Ile Saint-Louis, all three buildings located on the placid Seine. The Louvre looms in shadow beneath an approaching thunderstorm, reflecting the poor weather that seemed to dog this Paris trip. Whenever the sun showed, Hopper exploited its dimension-giving brightness on walls as in Le Quai des Grands Augustins, where the distant buildings leap into relief.

      His technique became so secure that he used oils with a surety of stroke that found even greater expression with his later watercolours. The buildings, boats and bridges are sketched solidly into place with a minimum of fuss and disdain for details. The oils are the antithesis of his precise, linear commercial illustrations. Where the illustrations are fussy, the oils reveal a minimalist skill confidently displayed. His jumble of angles and forms gracing magazine covers in dynamic display are absent from the conceit exercised in his simple oil compositions.

      20. Macomb’s Dam Bridge, 1935. Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 152.9 cm. The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, bequest of Mary T. Crockcroft.

      21. Blackwell’s Island, 1911. Oil on canvas, 62.1 × 75.6 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

      22. James Abbott Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold-Old Battersea Bridge, c.1872–1875. Oil on canvas, 68.3 × 51.2 cm. Tate Britain, London.

      Hopper had become a master of painting and drawing and now searched for his voice.

      Eventually, lack of money and overabundance of bad weather shortened his second visit to the City of Light and eliminated any further European exploration. He departed on 31 July aboard the Holland-American Line steamship Ryndam and arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey on 9 August 1909.

      Once back in New York, Hopper drew from his memory and imagination three compositions he probably carried with him in his head from the French shores. Gail Levin in her seminal biography on Hopper[9] seizes a telling parallel between Hopper’s Valley of the Seine and Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow, an elevated view of the Hudson River where it loops back on itself forming a peninsula in the valley. In Cole’s painting – shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1908 – a very detailed foreground of shrubbery and a moss-overgrown and lightning-shattered tree blend with an approaching storm that holds the eye in check. Beyond the brooding foreground and storm clouds, the bend in the river seen far below lies revealed in sunlight. Hopper grew up along the Hudson River and probably saw Cole’s painting.

      His Valley of the Seine is almost an homage, but he reverses the effect. Hopper plants a brilliantly sun-lit white railroad bridge opposite a wall of dark woods not unlike the Hudson’s palisades. Behind the tall woods is a small town suggested by a scribble of brushwork that becomes roofs and walls. In the far distance, the Seine bends back upon itself recalling the looping Hudson in The Oxbow. To appreciate Hopper’s masterly rendition of this scene, the viewer need only look

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