An excerpt from Louis Shadwick’s new Edward Hopper biography, published in the Art Newspaper Tuesday, reveals that all six of the artist’s early oil paintings are in fact copies of other artists’ works, rather than Hopper’s own original compositions. Hopper made the paintings in a studio in his family’s home in Nyack, New York, when he was a teenager, before attending art school in New York City.
The works were discovered in the attic of Hopper’s childhood home in the late 1960s, after the artist’s death, by the Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn. Sanborn, a Baptist minister, lived down the street from Hopper’s family and had cared for Hopper’s sister and wife. He somewhat controversially acquired a trove of Hopper memorabilia—letters, photographs, notebooks, and the like—along with early paintings and drawings, from the Hopper house in Nyack as well as the couple’s Greenwich Village apartment. Much of this archive is now owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art.
According to Shadwick, Sanborn also gave some of these early oil paintings new, misleading titles, and assumed Hopper had conceived of the compositions himself, inspired by his surroundings in Nyack. One example was titled Old Ice Pond at Nyack by Sanborn, and for decades was thought to depict the skating pond near where Hopper grew up; Sanborn called another Rowboat on Hudson, similarly connecting it to Hopper’s environs. Both, it turns out, are copies Hopper made from instructional images reproduced in color plates in the publication Art Interchange. Old Ice Pond at Nyack was a copy of a painting by Bruce Crane called A Winter Sunset (December 1890 issue), and Rowboat on Hudson (or Rowboat in Rocky Cove, as it was also known) was a copy of a watercolor titled Lake View by an unidentified artist (February 1891).
Other examples of early oil paintings mentioned by Shadwick include Country Road (copied from A Landscape Study in Color by John Francis Murphy), Ships (copied from Marine View by Edward Moran), and Clipper Ship Being Towed by Tug (copied from Stormy Voyage by Fred Pansing). Hopper painted all of these in the late 1890s, when he was around 15 or 16 years old; most are signed with his name or initials.
Shadwick does not think Hopper was attempting to mislead anyone regarding the nature of these early paintings. Rather, “the signatures suggest the artist’s youthful pride in his earliest achievements in oil that were never intended to be seen publicly.” More than a “gotcha,” Shadwick’s discovery acts as a revision to the way Hopper’s early artistic output is perceived. His gift for painting did not, it turns out, emerge suddenly during adolescence with no instruction, nor was he first exposed to American art movements in art school.