Active Years: 1882-1967

Position: American painter of works invoking solitude and isolation, in which architecture and light play distinctive framing roles.

Career Highlights: Early Sunday Morning, 1930 (Whitney Museum, New York); Nighthawks, 1942 (Art Institute, Chicago); Rooms by the Sea, 1951 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut); Carolina Morning, 1955 (Whitney Museum, New York).

Scouting Report: Hopper can be credited with developing a truly American pathos in painting. He depicted all-night diners with customers quietly going about their business, placid scenes of small-town American life, grand vistas of the country’s landscapes and voyeuristic views into the houses and workplaces with their inhabitants. The people are rarely the subjects of the paintings, however. Hopper was more interested in the effects of light and shadow. Just as Monet painted numerous works of the same subject at different times of day and in different weather, Hopper focused on the effects of the atmosphere, frequently utilizing crucial times of day such as sunrise and dusk as the setting in his paintings. The formal qualities of the light and shadows on the architecture and landscapes in Hopper’s paintings became a source of inspiration for many Abstract Expressionist artists.

Teammates and Contemporaries: Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Jackson Pollock.

Fun Fact: Hopper made two extended trips to Paris between 1906 and 1909. Instead of participating in the art scene that was witnessing Cezanne and the first cubist works by Picasso, he preferred to focus on his own paintings of Paris from life. He later said that he was completely unaware of Cezanne and Picasso, but was greatly influenced by the earlier Impressionist works he saw there.