Lot 18
  • 18

Edward Hopper 1882-1967

bidding is closed

Description

  • Edward Hopper
  • Houses on the Beach, Gloucester
  • signed Edward Hopper, l.r.
  • watercolor on paper
  • 14 by 20 in.
  • (35.6 by 50.8 cm)
  • Executed circa 1923.

Provenance

Frank K.M. Rehn, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired from the above, 1956

Exhibited

Brooklyn, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, American Painting: Selections from the Collection of Daniel and Rita Fraad, June-November 1964, no. 62, p. 73, illustrated p. 103
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper, September-November 1964, no. 79, p. 66
Fort Worth, Texas, Amon Carter Museum, American Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings from the Collection of Rita and Daniel Fraad, May-July 1985, no. 49, p. 102, illustrated p. 103
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Edward Hopper: Light Years, October-November 1988, no. 6, p. 20, illustrated p. 17
Washington, D.C., The National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute; Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors, October 1999-March 2000, no. 6, pp. 27-28, illustrated in color fig. 33

Literature

The artist's record book, vol I, p. 72 (in an addendum)
Hilton Kramer, "In the Museums," Art in America, April 1964, p. 39, illustrated
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, New York, 1995, no. W-81, p. 50, illustrated in color

Catalogue Note

Edward Hopper spent his first summer on the New England Coast in 1912, and returned to Gloucester for the second time in the summer of 1923.  During his second visit, the New England resort town was brimming with other artists, most notably Milton Avery and Stuart Davis, and also a painter named Jo Nivison, whom Hopper would later marry.  Encouraged by Jo to endeavor in watercolor, Hopper began a series of works of Gloucester homes, both majestic and ordinary, which, in many ways, anticipate the rest of his career.  The artist mused, “At Gloucester, when everyone else would be painting ships and the waterfront, I’d just go around looking at houses.  It is a solid-looking town.  The roofs are very bold, the cornices bolder.  The dormers cast very positive shadows.  The sea captain influence I guess- the boldness of the ships” (Virginia Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 24).

Houses on the Beach, Gloucester, likely painted during Hopper’s second summer in Gloucester, typifies the watercolors of this period with its careful attention to the classic American architecture and in its fluid washes in cool tones.  The translucency of the watercolor medium, combined with the spontaneity required in execution, proved to be ideally suited to capturing the luminosity that Hopper sought--a quality that has become a hallmark of his work.  His commitment to commonplace subject matter, which he often infused with a subtle mood of mystery or melancholy continued to offer his contemporary audience a novel interpretation of the familiar American scene.

Virginia Mecklenberg writes, “In Houses on the Beach, Gloucester the ribbon of sand in the foreground drops off to the beach revealing the bulkhead that protects the house and the support piling visible below.  Here Hopper has emphasized the precariousness of homes set at the water’s edge.  The cropping of the house at the right, the dramatic silhouetting of the gambrel roof against the sky, and the fences that prevent outside approach reflect the dichotomy between nature and culture that would become a Hopper trademark” (Edward Hopper: The Watercolors, p. 27).