Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
7. Après-Midi de juin or L’Après-Midi de printemps, 1907. Oil on canvas, 59.7 × 73 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
With his father’s practical approval and his mother’s profession-oriented encouragement, he decided to pursue a career as a commercial illustrator and enrolled in the New York School of Illustrating at 114 West 34th St.
Magazine and graphic poster illustration was in its “golden period” at the turn of the century. The mechanics of printing had embraced the photographic method of transferring the finished drawing to the printing plate with a half-tone screen. This reducing of the illustration to a series of dots allowed flexible sizing to any page dimension or cropping requirement. Freedom to employ a variety of media gave the artist a broad scope of interpretation.
Since there were so many magazines, advertisements, posters and stories to be illustrated, good illustrators who met deadlines and were literate enough to capture the core idea for the image were in great demand. There was good money in illustration. Publications and corporations who coupled their public identity to the work of these men prized those artists who reached the top rank. And it was a man’s world. Regardless of talent, women were rarely accepted into the illustration schools. A woman’s creative energies were best focused on producing happy, well-behaved children and a suitable home life for her husband. Their art was a hobby, a dabble, a device to keep idle hands busy. Edward Hopper was all right with that.
Enrolled on a monthly basis, he commuted daily from Nyack to New York, working in the classroom and at home on “practice sheets” devised by the school’s “dean,” Charles Hope Provost. These learn-by-rote copy sheets, originally designed as a correspondence school teaching aid, catered to the widest possible spectrum of would-be talent in order to corral the most tuitions. Hopper had already spent time after high school copying illustrations of his favourite artists and churning out original sketches of characters and scenes from literature. After a year of Provost’s shallow instruction, Hopper raised his sights to study fine art as well as commercial illustration. His parents agreed to chip in the $15 a month fee and in 1900, his portfolio was impressive enough to be accepted at the New York School of Art where William Merritt Chase held sway.
Chase was a product of the nineteenth-century European academy system. He came from Williamsburg, Indiana, showed early artistic promise and found enough local patronage in St Louis to afford European study. His efforts placed him in the Royal Academy of Munich in 1872. His return to the United States in the late 1870s led art critics, reviewers and trend prognosticators to suggest he would become one of the great American painters. They were to be disappointed.
Chase’s style was entrenched in European realism and his subjects lacked an “American” flavour. As the moral climate shifted toward a more uplifting fiction, away from the low and gritty reality of the late nineteenth-century American scene, so he shifted to the pose of the flâneur, a French term for a detached observer of life. Chase painted from life, but a moral, uplifting, civilised life that appealed to upper class art buyers and art students anxious to sell. His lessons in composition and his flawless technique were valuable to many of his students who went on to eclipse him: Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper.
Another instructor who crossed Hopper’s path was the young Kenneth Hayes Miller. While teaching at the New York school, Miller was developing his painting style that matured in the early 1920s. His lush urban paintings were referred to by one contemporary critic as an “attempt to make Titian feel at home on 14th Street and crowd Veronese into a department store.”[2]
He also pursued nineteenth-century painting tradition by giving weight and substance to his characters through a build-up of a layered pigment impasto beneath thin glazes of colour. Because Miller’s subjects favoured the reality of the streets, Hopper preferred Miller to Chase’s more refined fiction still rooted in the European academy.
By the time young Edward rose each day in Nyack for the train ride to Hoboken and the ferry trip to New York, he was a home-grown, virtually self-taught raw talent looking for direction. That talent quickly swept him to the head of Chase’s illustration class where he confronted live models in costume and the heady excitement of “fitting in” with a roomful of working artists. His classmates were a rowdy lot of young men filled with pent up energy and looking for relief from the hours spent examining how a shadow moulds the shape of a cheek or working the edge of a charcoal stick to perfectly follow the swell of the model’s thigh just above the knee. As the concentration was intense so was the release.
Many of these “boys” would become icons in the world of American art: George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Guy Pène du Bois, C. K.”Chat” Chatterton, Walter Tittle and some, such as the poet Vachel Lindsay and the actor, Clifton Webb, who accepted their lack to drawing talent to become icons in the world of letters and the theatre. Hopper’s pranks and teasing blended with the male atmosphere. His dry humour came in bursts and left its mark on those it touched. His original timidity hidden behind a substantial wall of reserve began to fade away as he grew more comfortable in the grungy studios where students scraped their palettes clean at the end of the day and left the gobs of colour spread on the walls and decorating the wretched caked and stratified easels.
There were also the “smells” of art: graphite, kneaded erasers, chalk dust, charcoal, linseed oil, glue, sizing, raw wood stretchers and drum-stiff canvas, the piquancy of sweat and turpentine, pig-bristle brushes and Conté crayons, white lead and varnish. The dried crumbs and powdered remnants ground their way into crevices of the easels, straddle boards and overturned chairs used as easels. Drips dried on work aprons, smocks and blotched shoes. This tactile evidence of creation was a tonic that focused the mind and calmed the tremor in the too-early-morning hand.
With an eye to paying the bills, commercial illustration and its practical applications still claimed a part of his training. His studies included classes with illustrators Arthur Keller and Frank Vincent Du Mond. He still envied the great commercial illustrators of his time and their ability to capture life on a page.
By the turn of the century, Impressionism had engulfed Europe with its gauzy, filmy play of light by the likes of Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, and Degas contrasted with the substantial shapes of Manet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne. As Chase sent Hopper and his classmates to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Edouard Manet, so did Hopper’s next great influence, Robert Henri, who began teaching at the New York School of Art in 1902.
Henri (pronounced hen-RYE) studied in France under the slick technician and master of the romantic allegory, William Adolphe Bouguereau. Henri bolted from the trompe-l’œil style of meticulous rendition to the looser, broad stroke technique of the Post-Impressionists. He also sought to create a more rounded approach to the teaching process by including reading and discussion of writers in his drawing classes. Hopper, the chronic reader, was enthralled by Henri’s shift of creative priorities. As Chase had preached art for art’s sake, Henri stressed art for life’s sake.
8. Les Lavoirs à Pont Royal, 1907. Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 88.3 × 4.4 cm (framed). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
9. Ecluse de la Monnaie, 1909. Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 73.2 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
10. Le Parc de Saint-Cloud, 1907. Oil on canvas, 74 × 86.7 × 2.5 cm (framed). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
“Henri’s class was the seat of sedition among the young,” wrote Guy du Bois. Vachel Lindsay noted Henri demanded “…force, likeness and expression” in the students’ portraits.[3]
Hopper’s nude studies under Henri’s tutelage between 1902 and 1904 reflect the models as solid shapes formed by light and shadow rather than linear creatures