Edward Hopper spent his first summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1912, and returned to this idyllic coast town on the New England coast for the second time in 1923. During his second visit, Gloucester was brimming with other artists, most notably Stuart Davis and Milton Avery, along with a lesser known painter named Josephine “Jo” Nivison, whom Hopper would marry the following year.
Jo soon proved instrumental in directing Hopper’s art and career, perhaps most significantly by persuading him to work in watercolor, a medium he had not used regularly since his days as an illustrator. Hopper began a series of works inspired by Gloucester homes, both majestic and mundane, 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”
Lloyd Goodrich writes, "It was in Gloucester in 1923 that [Hopper] embarked on the watercolors of houses and village streets that were to become his first generally known type of subject—for a while, one might say, his trademark. He liked spare wooden houses and churches of the early years, their puritan severity sometimes relieved by jigsaw ornamentation; or the more flamboyant mansions of the late nineteenth century with their mansard roofs, wide spreading porches, and jutting dormers and bay windows. But equally he liked the poorer rundown sections, the bare unpainted tenements, the jumble of sheds, privies, and the fish houses and factories” (Edward Hopper, New York, 1978, p. 53).
Hopper achieved his first success in the watercolor medium when 11 of his Gloucester works were exhibited in a one-man show at the Frank K.M. Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924. Every work sold and the exhibition proved to be a pivotal turning point in Hopper’s career. In a review of his work, Helen Appleton Read, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s art critic, “lauded Hopper for carrying on the ‘vital and simple manner’ of Winslow Homer, whom she identified as ‘the supreme influence’ on contemporary American watercolor painting. Hopper, like Homer, she wrote, ‘believes in the authority of big simple forms over the effect attained by brilliant brushwork,’ valuing directness over dash and the plainspoken over the picturesque” (quoted in Carol Troyen, Edward Hopper, 2007, Boston, Massachusetts, p. 62). Similar to Hopper, Homer adopted watercolor as his primary and favored medium after spending a formative summer in Gloucester in 1873.
Executed during Hopper’s third visit to Gloucester in the summer of 1924, Gloucester House and Factory exemplifies the artist’s watercolors of this period in its careful attention to the classic American architecture as well as 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 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 fresh interpretation of the familiar American scene.
