Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper’s luminous paintings captured classic images of middle-class America and made him one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century.

Edward Hopper was one of the most important observers of the American scene beginning in the 1920s. Although Hopper had been a student of Robert Henri and was familiar with the busy social scenes of the Ashcan school painters, he focused his own imagery on the alienation of modern life. He often portrayed solitary and isolated figures that seem to be aching with loneliness or multiple figures that do not interact. Hopper also recorded architectural scenes, both rural and urban, instilling each with a similar feeling of abandonment; he chronicled the ravages of the Depression by depicting forsaken farms and "For Sale" signs on suburban streets.

In 1927 Hopper delivered a painting entitled Ex Lax-Drug Store to his dealer Frank K. M. Rehn in New York City. Peggy Rehn, the dealer's wife, felt that the allusion to a laxative was indelicate, and Hopper was persuaded to change the second X to a C, which he did in watercolor. Shortly thereafter, however, John T. Spaulding, a Boston lawyer and collector who favored bold images, bought the painting for fifteen hundred dollars and encouraged Hopper to restore the product name. Now known as Drug Store, the painting is one of Hopper's early masterpieces. Many of the themes and devices seen in his later work are evident in this striking picture.

This text was adapted from Davis, et al., MFA Highlights: American Painting (Boston, 2003).