Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter

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      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 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 a 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 closely at the canvas and realise how few brush strokes created all the central details. Hopper seems to be performing here, challenging academic and old world pastoralists on their own turf.

      Le Bistrot, another post-Paris painting, captures a moment in time much as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists accomplished. Seurat, Degas, Renoir all captured moments in lives, moments framed. This painting resembles a photograph, a “decisive moment” captured decades later by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, or Alfred Eisenstaedt, all of whom studied the great painters. Huddled at an outdoor table like extras on a stage set, two women share a bottle of beer. Beyond them, a lemon-yellow bridge and walkway beneath four dry wind-bent cypress trees look more like a backdrop about to be rolled up. Called from his imagination and memory, Le Bistrot remains a mythical place.

      Summer Interior, also painted in 1909 in New York, is a near abstraction. A half-dressed nude sprawls next to an unmade bed. She’s not anchored to the floor, but floats along with colour shapes representing a fireplace, a wall or shuttered door, the pale green carpet with a hot rectangle of window light pinned to it. The brown of the bed frame recedes, but all the other planes come forward giving the room a restless, unfinished appearance. The disconsolate girl is a leftover from an event having taken place in a lonely dreamscape. Like the couple in Le Bistrot, she has no identity. They are all symbols, the first in a long line of Hopper’s haunted subjects.

      Once again, Robert Henri’s “Ash Can” artists organised a show to run from 1–27 April 1910 in a former warehouse on West 35th Street. This Exhibition of Independent Artists not only flew in the face of New York’s art academia, it overlapped with the dates of a show at the National Academy of Design. The exhibition offered wall space to artists for a fee of $10 for one painting and a bargain $18 for two. This reduced price opportunity to show with some of the most well known of the “Ash Can” artists lured in 344 entries. Among them was Edward Hopper.

      Again, his pinch-penny existence limited him to a single entry and he chose Le Louvre et la Seine, an early French painting with its shimmering impressionist palette from 1907. Dragging out this retro work was almost an act of self-destruction. Almost any of his 1909 canvases would have at least showed his move towards a more personal aesthetic.

      The show was well-reviewed and, once again, he remained invisible to the critics. Stubborn to the end, Hopper nursed his pennies and churned out commercial illustrations to earn cash for yet another expedition to Paris.

      The RMS Adriatic docked at Plymouth, England on 11 May 1910, and a sober Edward Hopper disembarked knowing he had only his own finances and references to fall back upon. Once in Paris, he took a cheap room at the Hôtel des Ecoles in the Latin Quarter. But he remained only a week before following in Robert Henri’s footsteps of the previous year and boarding the train to Madrid. He played the tourist, wandering through the sights and sounds, writing home and attending a “sickening” bullfight, of which one scene ended up considerably later in an etching.

      The thrall of Europe had faded. The delights of Paris had diminished and his final trip abroad ended in departure from Cherbourg on 1 July aboard the Cincinnati, a steamer of the Hamburg-American Line. He had not found the financial and worldly success in foreign travel that Henri had discovered. The trips abroad had actually changed his life for ever, but, in 1910, facing a return to the rigour of New York, the endless grind of commercial illustration and hunting for an outlet for his brilliant skills as a painter, young Edward had no clue as to his future.

      On his Terms

      Hopper had a lot on his plate. He was “reduced” to trudging from one art and advertising agency to another with his portfolio, trying to peddle his skills as an illustrator to art directors he considered, for the most part, to be Philistines.

      He thought this work to be demeaning and beneath him. The illustrator’s market in the early 20th century consisted of hundreds of popular magazines, niche market magazines, trade journals, advertisements, story illustrations, and posters.

      Illustrating for cash was also a thief of time. Normally a slow starter under any circumstances, Hopper’s output of paintings dwindled to two in 1911. The oil Sailing (opposite) depicts a “Knockabout sloop rig – jib and mainsail taking up most of the canvas…”, in Hopper’s description. It is a subject painted from memory of his early days on the Hudson River. Again, using a minimum of strokes, the open cockpit sailboat is leaning hard over to port with its sails full, leaving a pale wake on an almost opaque sea. The sails and sky are heavily painted, covering a self-portrait that just peeps through to the naked eye if you are looking for it.

      The other painting, Blackwell’s Island, is a dark and moody affair with a composition that recalls Le Bistrot, but with the opposite effect. Its provenance demonstrates Hopper’s desire to crack the code and step into the limelight. Robert Henri had arrived triumphant from Europe in 1901 to settle in New York. From the window of his apartment on East 58th Street, he had a view of Blackwell’s Island in the East River and painted a picture postcard winter scene complete with ice floes. In 1909, George Bellows, one of Henri’s anointed stars, chose the island, highlighting the Queensborough Bridge with the busy Manhattan waterfront in the foreground. In 1910, Julius Golz – another Henri favourite – won critical praise at the Independents’ Exhibition for his stab at Blackwell’s Island.

      Sailing, 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 61 × 73.7 cm.

      Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

      Yonkers, 1916.

      Oil on canvas, 61.6 × 73.9 cm.

      Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

      Having moved from his studio among the prostitutes on 14th Street, Hopper found space at 53 East 59th Street very near Robert Henri’s studio. Henri and two of his acolytes had found success with Blackwell’s Island and so, it appears, might Hopper. He was aware of James MacNeil Whistler, whose pictures were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1910, and chose an approach to the island that reflected Whistler’s Aestheticism.

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