Edward Hopper - House in Italian Quarter [1923]

Edward Hopper - House in Italian Quarter [1923], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Edward Hopper was born July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, 25 miles north of New York City, into a family of English, Dutch, French and Welsh ancestry. His maternal grandfather built the house (preserved today as a landmark and community art centre) where he and his sister, Marion, who was two years older, grew up. Hopper's father, Garrett Henry Hopper, was a dry goods merchant. His mother, Elizabeth Griffiths Smith Hopper, enjoyed drawing, and both his parents encouraged their son's artistic inclinations and preserved his early sketches of himself, his family and the local countryside. Gangling and self-effacing, Edward, who was over six feet tall at age 12, was teased by his classmates. His differentness probably reinforced solitary pursuits - he gravitated to the river, to sketching, to sailing and to painting. Even as a child, Hopper recalled, he noticed "that the light on the upper part of a house was different than that on the lower part. There is a sort of elation about sunlight on the upper part of a house."

[Watercolour, 50.5 x 60.6 cm]

Edward Hopper - Summer Interior [1909]

Edward Hopper - Summer Interior [1909], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Hopper made three trips to Paris from 1906 to 1910. Summer Interior gives an idea of what he was capable of in those early years. Trying to guess the artist, you might think the painting was by Pierre Bonnard or Édouard Vuillard. There's a tactile quality missing from a lot of Hopper's later works, in the sheet pulled down from the bed and the woman's toes just touching the thickly painted shaft of light, like another sheet, on the green floor. The abstract yellow and reddish-brown stripes to the right are presumably a Venetian blind, called a jalousie in French. Some theme of sexual jealousy may be at work in this freeze frame from an unknown narrative.

[Oil on canvas, 61 x 73.7 cm]