A new biography of Edward Hopper by Louis Shadwick reveals that all six of the painter’s early oil compositions, made before he enrolled in art school, are copies of the work of other artists. Shadwick found that the original works appeared as color plates in Art Interchange, a widely read periodical for amateur artists that encouraged its readers to copy from its pages and provided instructions for doing so.
Hopper completed six oils before beginning his art training and left them in the attic of his family’s home in Nyack, which he had converted into a studio at age thirteen. They were found there in the late 1960s alongside early drawings, oils, and watercolors. Hopper’s first work, made between 1898 and 1900, was Old Ice Pond at Nyack, thought to be one of Hopper’s only confirmed depictions of Nyack in oil.
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An excerpt from Shadwick’s new biography published in The Art Newspaper, reveals that in fact the painting is a copy of A Winter Sunset by the then-popular tonalist artist Bruce Crane. Other early works follow suit: Hopper’s Rowboat in Rocky Cove is a copy after the watercolor Lake View by an unknown painter; Country Road (ca. 1896) is a copy after A Landscape Study in Color by John Francis Murphy; Ships (ca.1898) copies Marine View by Edward Moran; and Clipper Ship Being Towed by Tug (ca. 1900) is revealed as a copy after Stormy Voyage by Fred Pansing. The source of the sixth painting, Winter Scene, is unknown but it resembles two other paintings of the same scene made in 1893 by Edgar Barnes Gilson.
Most of the paintings Hopper mimed appeared in various issues of Art Interchange: Winter Sunset was published in the December 1890 issue, Lake View in February 1891, A Landscape Study in Color in March 1886, and Marine View in August 1886.
Shadwick’s book, Edward Hopper: A Life, was published this month by Yale University Press.