Edward Hopper. Gerry Souter

back on his skills as a commercial illustrator to earn money and maintain some semblance of independence from his family. He immediately sought out his pals from the art school to find wall space for his new work during this temporary set-back. In the meantime, his portfolio landed him illustration piece-work with the Sherman and Bryan Agency knocking out straw hat ads in stylish Art Nouveau designs that were the current rage. A frieze of chatting men in half-tone silhouettes behind the rendering of a straw boater was hardly innovative but they helped Hopper build some savings towards his real goal – a rapid return to Paris.

      While Hopper slaved over his commercial drawing board, his mentor, Robert Henri, continued to create a buzz in the New York art world. With collectors and investors shying away from unknown American artists in favour of bankable Europeans – especially with the panic gripping America’s finances – Henri felt that home-grown talent needed showcases and the stilted world of academic art needed shaking up.

      Using his students as a base and trading on his own modest celebrity, on 3 February 1908 Henri opened a show of independent artists at the Macbeth Gallery at 450 Fifth Avenue. Besides his own work, he featured John Sloan, Ernest Lawson, George Luks, Everett Shinn, William Glackens, Arthur Davies, and Maurice Prendergast.

      Valley of the Seine, 1909.

      Oil on canvas, 66 × 96.2 cm.

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

      Reviews for “The Eight” were lukewarm and in the Evening Mail the artists were relegated to “… a future that is never going to happen at all”. This show did have impact beyond its original intent, however. It was the first non-juried exhibition without prizes that was organised and selected by a group of artists. This type of exhibition became the model for one of the most famous exhibits in the history of Modern Art, the Armory Show of 1913.

      While Henri’s show at the MacBeth Gallery confounded critics, another show had been in the works since 1906, entitled Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Contemporary American Artists. Installed on the top floor of a building at 43–45 West 42nd Street, the show opened on 9 March to run until 31 March 1908. Created by New York School of Art students Glenn Coleman, Arnold Friedman, and Julius Glotz, it featured fifteen artists; one of whom was Edward Hopper.

      Though the show purported to present the latest in striving for a “National Art”, Hopper and three other artists showed French paintings. He offered Le Louvre et la Seine, Le Parc de Saint-Cloud and Le Pont des Arts. Guy du Bois, Hopper’s friend from school, hung Gaité Montparnasse. Du Bois also became the mouthpiece for the group, using his media contacts to write articles and trumpet the group’s success. He became a particular champion for Hopper over the years in a maturing friendship.

      These young American painters, with Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Shinn at the core, had at last found wall space. They continued to follow Henri’s lead, seeking out gritty urban subject matter in New York. Together, the young rebels were dubbed The Ash Can School of American painting. While Urban Realism was nothing new – Chase had been an Urban Realist – the group’s subject matter portrayed the bottom half of the city’s population, the alleys, elevated trains, crowded streets, tenements, and steamy waterfronts.

      The subject matter and nature of Hopper’s style abstracted him from the grim and gritty “Ash Can” painters. If critics mentioned him at all, his work was considered, with a sniff, “European”. He did, however, shift his interest to more “national” scenes, creating Tramp Steamer (actually a British ship seen crossing the English Channel), The El Station, Railroad Train, and Tugboat with Black Smokestack. His palette remained light and he subsequently fell out of favour with Henri. While Hopper disagreed with Henri, he was still drawn to his former teacher’s example of going abroad over the summers. He cultivated a generally frugal lifestyle that would continue long after his reputation was made.

      In March 1909, Hopper bolted from New York, arrived in Plymouth, England on the 17th, and headed directly for Paris via Cherbourg. He wasted no time and set to work in familiar settings along the Seine and in the nearby French countryside. During this visit, his palette deepened and his brush strokes lost their choppy, impressionist quality. Le Pont Royal and Le Pavillon de Flore are more substantial as structures, as is the Ile Saint-Louis, all three buildings located on the placid Seine. The Louvre looms in shadow beneath an approaching thunderstorm, reflecting the poor weather that seemed to dog this Paris trip. Whenever the sun showed, Hopper exploited its dimension-giving brightness on walls as in Le Quai des Grands Augustins, where the distant buildings leap into relief.

      His technique became so secure that he used oils with a surety of stroke that found even greater expression with his later watercolours. The buildings, boats, and bridges are sketched solidly into place with minimum fuss and disdain for details. The oils are the antithesis of his precise, linear commercial illustrations. Where the illustrations are fussy, the oils reveal a minimalist skill confidently displayed. His jumble of angles and forms gracing magazine covers in dynamic display are absent from the conceit exercised in his simple oil compositions.

      Blackwell’s Island, 1911.

      Oil on canvas, 62.1 × 75.6 cm.

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

      Briar Neck, Gloucester, 1912.

      Oil on canvas, 61.4 × 73.6 cm.

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

      Hopper had become a master of painting and drawing and now searched for his voice.

      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,