Edward Hopper was a pioneer in the realistic portrayal of the American scene. During his painting career of sixty plus years, he strove to interpret the everyday features of contemporary America. As early as 1908, he was painting railroads, tugboats, steamers, and other objects or sites that none of his contemporaries seem to be interested in. Hopper’s chief subject matter was the physical face of America. “No artist was more aware of the architectural disorder and monotony of our cities, the dreariness of our suburbs, the rawness of our countryside, ravaged by industry and highspeed transportation.”4
Hopper’s choices of subject matter seem to be somewhat unpredictable but for the most part represented the city, the town, the water, and the countryside. Hopper concentrated on the myriad of pictorial possibilities within our large cities. He painted unique, unusual subjects in art such as hotel lobbies, apartments, offices and restaurants. He utilized empty evocative settings to project various moods. Through these moods, he revealed a variety of emotions and interpersonal relationships. His solitary figures often were central characters caught in contemplative, dreamlike circumstances. But there are no crowds in Hopper’s cities. The occasional figures are parts of the whole scene but not leading actors.
The small town represented another portrayal of the United States. The village buildings and boatfilled harbors were painted for their fascinating forms. In particular, Hopper loved the seaside towns of New England, especially Cape Cod. He and his wife Josephine spent many summers in Truro; subsequently many of his nautical paintings are of lighthouses, harbors, boats, and water. Since his boyhood days, he had been attracted to everything connected with boats and water. At the age of fifteen, he had built his own sailboat and sailed on the Hudson River at Nyack, New York. Although later in life, he readily admitted that sailing and the building of sailboats was not his forte.
As for the countryside, Hopper loved to travel. His American landscape paintings broke with tradition immediately. As he traveled throughout New England, the South, the far West, and Mexico, he painted the highways, gas stations, motels, railroad depots with their buildings and train crossings, and various forms of quaint architecture. Often the horizontal line of a road or railroad tracks formed a border or base for his drama that was beginning to unfold.