Early Paintings by Edward Hopper Found to Be Replicated From Magazines

“The only influence I’ve ever had was myself,” the American painter Edward Hopper once said. A recent discovery by a graduate student, however, may qualify the artist’s claim to originality: at least three early landscapes by Hopper are not original works, but rather imitations of paintings reproduced in instructional magazines for amateur artists.

Louis Shadwick, a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute in London, was researching his dissertation on Hopper when he came across a painting by the American Tonalist painter Bruce Crane, “A Winter Sunset” (c. 1880s), in an 1890 issue of The Art Interchange, an illustrated monthly publication for artists that included guides to copy paintings. Crane’s work was nearly identical to — and predated — “Old Ice Pond at Nyack” (c. 1897), an oil on canvas Hopper created as a teenager. 

“Old Ice Pond” and other paintings by Hopper from this early period were previously thought to depict the artist’s hometown of Nyack, New York. In an article for the art historical journal Burlington Magazine where he shares his findings, Shadwick says that it is uncertain when the work was titled, or whether it was even titled by the artist himself. It’s likely, he adds, that the title was bestowed by Arthayer R. Sanborn, a friend of the artist and beneficiary of Hopper’s sister’s will, who acquired the painting.

Shadwick found that another work by Hopper, “Ships” (c. 1898), was a copy of Edward Moran’s “A Marine” (c. 1880s), also illustrated in the Interchange. A third Hopper work, “Church and Landscape” (c. 1897), was copied from a scene painted on a Victorian porcelain plaque. 

Hopper is best known for his modernist paintings of American solitude, renderings of ghostly rooms and deserted diners populated by one or two straggling characters who stare listlessly into the abyss. These mature works have seduced audiences with their luminous surfaces and enigmatic, aloof energy.

But Hopper’s early oils, however uncharacteristic or ordinary to the average art enthusiast, have long been touted by experts and scholars as “his first original works,” Shadwick notes in his article. The “often-inflexible” categorizations of Hopper’s work, he adds, “have left little room for the myriad and often incongruous influences of his early career.”

“It becomes increasingly clear that his eventual, mature conception of realism was a composite derived from a broad spectrum of styles and movements,” Shadwick concludes. “Perhaps the apparent incongruity of these early influences can help to explain the unfixed, disparate and dislocated sense of Americanness that so haunts Hopper’s work.”

Source: Hyperallergic.com