Biographer argues Hopper’s six early oils copied printed models
Louis Shadwick traces five pre-art-school paintings to published images and argues that posthumous titles created a disputed link between two of them and Hopper’s childhood town of Nyack.
All six known oil paintings made by Edward Hopper before he entered art school were copies rather than original compositions, Louis Shadwick argues in an excerpt from his new biography published by The Art Newspaper. His reassessment challenges the belief that surviving boyhood oils record Hopper’s home town of Nyack.
Shadwick identifies ‘Old Ice Pond at Nyack’, dated around 1898-1900, as a copy of Bruce Crane’s ‘Winter Sunset’, reproduced with copying instructions in the December 1890 issue of Art Interchange. He identifies the signed and dated 1895 ‘Rowboat in Rocky Cove’ as after ‘Lake View’, a watercolour by an unknown painter published with similar instructions in the magazine in February 1891.
The Nyack associations originated after Hopper’s death, Shadwick writes. Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn, the first owner of the early works, found them in the attic of Hopper’s childhood home in the late 1960s. He supplied the title ‘Old Ice Pond at Nyack’ and called another work ‘Rowboat on Hudson’, linking both pictures to the artist’s childhood scenery. The latter was subsequently retitled ‘Rowboat in Rocky Cove’, but the Nyack connection persisted.
Shadwick also links ‘Country Road’, around 1896, to John Francis Murphy’s ‘A Landscape Study in Color’, reproduced in Art Interchange on 27 March 1886. He identifies ‘Ships’, around 1898, as a copy of Edward Moran’s ‘Marine View’, printed in the magazine in mid-August 1886. For ‘Church and Landscape’, formerly titled ‘Winter Scene’ by Sanborn, he has not found the precise printed model. He instead cites two 1893 paintings of the same scene by Edgar Barnes Gilson and a Victorian porcelain plaque as support for his view that it was copied.
Shadwick further identifies a previously uncatalogued work, titled by Sanborn ‘Clipper Ship Being Towed by Tug’, as after Fred Pansing’s ‘Stormy Voyage’. The image was published as a collectible lithograph in the New York Recorder’s Sunday art supplement on 7 May 1893. That source may place the Hopper painting before ‘Rowboat in Rocky Cove’, but its date remains uncertain.
Shadwick suggests that Hopper may not have made an original oil until he entered the New York School of Art in autumn 1900. That conclusion, and his assertion that no boyhood Nyack oils by Hopper survive, remain his interpretation of the assembled evidence.
