Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The neat, white clapboard and shingle house, with a wisteria-covered front porch, could be set in almost any mid-Atlantic small town — it seems to be straight out of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. But the home of the painter Edward Hopper is actually in Nyack, New York, just outside the metropolis. You can see the Hudson River from the house, a block away down the sloping street.The realist painter created spare, starkly lit works that share an introspective view of American life, and when visitors “experience the house, things click”, says director Kathleen Bennewitz. “They understand the direction that Hopper’s work takes. And they’re fascinated by how much of Nyack has not changed since Hopper’s time . . . You really feel like you’re stepping into a Hopper painting.” Hopper was born in 1882 in the house, which was built by his maternal grandfather, and lived there until his move to New York City in 1908. Only the front bedroom, used by Hopper as a studio in later years, is preserved as a period room, equipped with his easel. The rest of the house features rotating exhibitions of contemporary artists inspired by Hopper and family-focused activities.The boyhood sketchbooks on view in the back room are keys to understanding his trajectory. They reveal his precocious talent as a keen observer as well as his tentative ambition, with a practised signature reading “Edward Hopper, Artist?” His youthful drawings include sharp-edged pastiches of his parents and a moving sketch of a solitary boy staring at the sea, drawn on the back of a report card from when he was nine years old. Hopper’s rusty bicycle hangs above the brick fireplace.“You see a lot of aloneness — I won’t say loneliness — and a lot of structure” in his works, says tour guide Eileen White. Bullied in childhood, Hopper remained introverted and shy of the limelight throughout his life, preferring to express himself through art. “My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature,” Hopper explained in 1933 with reference to his landscapes rather than the interiors he is renowned for. Those works, too, are imbued with a sense of longing, separateness and unknowability.Hopper worked in commercial illustration before achieving success through his paintings in the 1920s. His wife and fellow artist Josephine managed the business side of things throughout their volatile relationship, her career largely subsumed by his. She often contributed titles for the paintings, and kept detailed records of their output. She also insisted on modelling for all the female figures in his works.Hopper had absorbed the influence of the Impressionists’ handling of light on several early trips to Paris. His 1942 painting “Nighthawks”, with its dramatic chiaroscuro and quiet urban portrait of diner patrons being alone, together, remains one of his most famous. The composition has been parodied in films, paintings, comics, The Simpsons and even a maudlin New Year’s New Yorker cover. His work also influenced many visual artists, including filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, who employed his striking tonality in his “noir” films.Though Hopper’s critical acclaim faded as Abstract Expressionism came into fashion in the 1940s-50s, he remained popular, earning a Time Magazine cover portrait in 1956 that Josephine derided in a letter: “‘Nighthawks’ is so much better Hopper than that odious grinning old goofie,” she wrote. She was right that Hopper’s eye for composition and atmosphere would endure far longer than that portrait. Though Hopper spent most of his adult life in New York City and on Cape Cod, he was buried in Nyack’s cemetery on his death in 1967, a fitting return to the place that shaped his work that still, in many ways, defines Americana. edwardhopperhouse.orgFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
