Edward Hopper 1882 - 1967

Josephine N. Hopper (the artist’s wife)
Bequest to the present owner from the above, 1968

New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Palm Beach, Florida, The Society of the Four Arts; Fort Worth, Texas, Fort Worth Art Museum; La Jolla, California, La Jolla Museum of Art; Sacramento, California, E.B. Crocker Art Gallery; Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Center; Kansas City, Missouri, William Rockhill Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum of Fine Arts; Richmond, Virginia, Richmond Museum of Fine Arts; Athens, Georgia, Athens Museum of Art; Baltimore, Maryland, The Baltimore Museum of Art; Madison, Wisconsin, Elvehjem Art Center; Toledo, Ohio, The Toledo Museum of Art; Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Fort Lauderdale Museum of the Arts; Montgomery, Alabama, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Edward Hopper: Selections from the Bequest to the Whitney Museum of American Art, September 1971-May 1974, no. 91, illustrated p. 51
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Downtown Branch, Edward Hopper: Paintings, Prints, Drawings, July-August 1974
Nyack, New York, The Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation, Welcome Home Edward Hopper, June-July 1976
Adelaide, Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia; Melbourne, Australia, National Gallery of Victoria; Sydney, Australia, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The World of Edward Hopper: Selections from the Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, March-August 1982
Hempstead, New York, Emily Lowe Gallery, Hofstra University, 1935: The Year and the Arts, April-June 1985, illustrated p. 4
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Edward Hopper: Selections from the Permanent Collection, July-November 1989
Humlebaek, Denmark, Louisiana Museum; Brussels, Belgium, Les Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts; Frankfurt, Germany, Schirn Kunsthalle, Edward Hopper, January 1992-February 1993, no. 94, p. 202, illustrated in color p. 122
Asheville, North Carolina, Asheville Art Museum, The Nature of Inspiration: Modern Masters from the Whitney Museum of American Art, October 1999-January 2000
Rome, Italy, Fondazione Roma Museo; Lausanne, Switzerland, Fondation de l’Hermitage, Edward Hopper, October 2009-October 2010, no. 7.23, p. 262, illustrated in color p. 246

Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist, New York and London, 1980, illustrated in color p. 182
Susan Larsen, Deborah Lyons and Paul Levine, "Edward Hopper," Louisiana Revy, vol. 32, no. 2, January 1992, no. 94, p. 67
Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York and London, 1995, no. W-352, p. 321, illustrated in color
Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors, New York and London, 1999, pp. 163, 170-71 n. 13, 173 n. 57

This work is in excellent condition. The color is extremely fresh and vibrant. There are tack marks along all four edges of the sheet outside of the image.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Edward Hopper purchased his first car in 1927, augmenting his ability to escape the confines of his Manhattan home to discover new, unfamiliar subject matter for his artworks. “To me the most important thing is the sense of going on,” he articulated of his peripatetic impulse. “You know how beautiful things are when you’re traveling” (Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places, Berkeley, California, 1998, p. 8). With his wife Jo at the wheel and Hopper in the backseat, the automobile became the couple’s traveling studio (Fig. 1). Trips on the road became an important source of creative inspiration for Hopper, not only providing him with the capacity to seek out motifs and subject matter, but also informing his compositions in a new and sophisticated manner. The view from the car gave Hopper a fresh, vivid perspective onto the world, and he began to translate this outlook onto canvas and paper. In works like Church in Eastham, Hopper eschews a more conventional panoramic view and presents an intimate, unmediated experience of the American landscape.

In 1930, Hopper and Jo began spending their summers in South Truro on Cape Cod, at that time a rather rural town just south of the burgeoning artistic communities in Provincetown. For six months each year, the Hoppers lived and worked among the great dunes and rolling hills of the Cape, and in 1934, built a house overlooking Massachusetts Bay. In this remote haven, Hopper began to paint, often in watercolor, the plain wooden houses and New England architecture with which he is now most closely associated. Here he also found the brilliant sunlight that he had captured so successfully in his early oils and watercolors of the 1920s at Gloucester and Cape Elizabeth. Light in all of its varying degrees—whether illuminating the bleached white clapboard of a seaside cottage or the sandy dunes of Cape Cod beaches—would continue to be a fundamental component of his work for the rest of his career.

By the summer of 1932, Hopper felt he had exhausted the motifs Truro offered and began to venture farther out on the Cape. Watercolor endured as his preferred medium during his automobile excursions, as its mobility allowed him to paint his chosen subject on the spot, as his watercolors were always painted, rather than his oil paintings which typically required a longer period of planning and execution in a studio. The immediacy watercolor provided became essential to his work in this medium. Hopper chose his subjects with care, often exploring a location over a long period of time and examining a potential setting intensely in order to select its most compelling vantage point. In Eastham, just south of Truro, Hopper found many sites that attracted his attention, and he felt creatively renewed while working there, the place Jo referred to as her husband’s, “happy hunting ground” (Jo Hopper, diary entry of October 25, 1941, quoted in Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, p. 344).

Church in Eastham depicts a section of a local church and its immediate surroundings ablaze with the first signs of autumn. Hopper’s body of work is marked by his lifelong fascination with architecture, and the churches he encountered throughout the Cape Cod countryside often attracted his attention; he appreciated the distinctive visual elements these structures possessed. In Church in Eastham, Hopper tightly frames the composition so that the viewer is granted only a fragmentary glimpse of the scene. Diverging from other artists’ techniques, Hopper prioritized the main elements of the composition as he executed a watercolor, delineating these portions of his subject first and adding the sky and background afterwards. In the present work, Hopper takes care to portray the finely wrought details of the Eastham church, paying particular attention to the different effects of light and shadow on the various manmade and natural elements throughout the composition. The smooth rendering of the sliver of stained glass window and the clapboard exterior of the church contrasts dynamically with the more expressive execution of the foliage, which is depicted with a saturated, almost impasto-like effect. In other areas of the composition, the paper support is left exposed as the artist has scraped and rubbed away some areas of pigment to achieve a rich, painterly sense of texture.

While Church in Eastham exemplifies Hopper’s sophisticated execution in the medium of watercolor, it is also representative of his thoroughly modern vision of the American landscape. As in other works he produced at this time, in Church in Eastham Hopper adopts the point of view of a motorist, indicated by the low, street-level perspective and the relative absence of foreground. As he sharply crops and compresses the picture plane, Hopper collapses the space between the viewer and the subject and obstructs any immediate recognition of the location. Indeed, only the title concretely situates the setting of his subject. The work consequently emerges less as a conventional landscape and more as a dynamic exploration of shapes, angles, color and pattern, and of the visual relationships between them.