a
Hopper's mature
American
style.
Village, the earliest of the three,
window ledge, 130). Hopper would
of a city street seen from high above, over a
forms the foreground of the painting
(PI.
high, oblique vantage point that renders the significant even
Night Shadows
more
(Fig. 22).
The
human
several years later
effectively
a view
is
which
33
use this
figures small
and
in
etching
his
EDWARD HOPPER
itself
1921
in-
blue-gray tonality of American Village, like
that in Hopper's Blackwell's Island, creates a somber, unfriendly
depressing glimpse at small-town America
(PI.
mood—
245). This, in fact,
how
is
Hopper felt about his native Nyack, which he considered cloistered, gossipy, and provincial. Years later Hopper would develop such city views into powerfully evocative and even more intensely personal works. Here, however, his roots in the tradition of Robert Henri and The Eight are still quite evident.
The experimental ent when American
nature of these years of development becomes appar-
J'lllage is compared with The Dories, Ogunquit, and Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit, painted only two years later in Ogunquit (Pis. 133, 132). Both of these canvases are full of light; the somber tonality seen two years earlier has vanished. But in Rocks and Houses, Ogunquit,
the horizontal composition
is
simple and straightforward— rocks,
England wooden houses rendered however,
is
in subtle tones.
strikingly open, asymmetrical,
and
filled
The
New
trees.
Dories, Ogunquit,
with intense light and
strong color, most notably the deep blue of the water and the softer blues
The
of the sky.
rocks are highlighted with
warm orange
tones, while the
moons on the water. The composition drawn into the painting's depth, through
dories stand out like white crescent is
arranged so that the viewer
the rocky
cliffs
to the strip of
is
land highlighted in the distance. Hopper's
achievements here would later be developed in his sunny canvases of
on Cape Cod. About this time, Hopper began to give art instruction in Nyack, perhaps in the hope of doing less illustration, but certainly to earn more income. The classes were held in his family's house on Saturdays, and his mother provided the young pupils with lemonade and cookies. First he had the students sketch with charcoal on large sheets of paper from plaster casts of antique sculpture, then his mother posed for them, seated in a chair; eventually they worked in oil (Fig. 37). One of his former students, then nautical scenes
about age eleven, recalled her disappointment when Hopper, did develop silly to
who
never
patience for children, told her mother that she was too
much
continue.^
In Feljruary
igif),
eight of Hopper's Paris watercolor caricatures were
reproduced on a page in the magazine Arts and Decoration.^^ In the
magazine to feature his work, he permitted himself caricatures that he
had made
to
in Paris, again indicating the
placed on that aspect of his career
(Pis.
first
be represented by
importance he
91-96).
For the summer of 1916 Hopper went to Monhegan Island, Maine, "a
way out
small island quite a
to sea,"
where Henri, Kent, Bellows, and
Golz had also painted. ''s Monhegan, with ing headlands, eddies,
its
the
forest
"its
rock-bound shores,
thundering surf with gleaming
and
its
crests
its
tower-
and emerald
flowering meadowlands," completely captivated
Fig.
37. Cast of
classes
New
head used by Hopper
held in his mother's
York.
home
in
for
Nyack,