Edward Hopper was born in Nyack in New York State and didn't have to eat his own toenail clippings or sell school chums on street corners because his parents owned a shop and did very nicely thank you. He went to the New York School of Art where he was taught by Robert Henri, the founder of the 'Ash Can' School of American Realism (one block down from the College of the Kitchen Sink).
Like almost every other aspiring young dauber, chipper and scribbler of the early C20, Ed went to Paris but seemed to have hung around in all the wrong cafes because the place didn't make much of a post-impression(ism) on him, so he stuck to being inspired by his personal big four 'oldies but goldies', Goya, Velasquez, Manet and Daumier, rather than going all metaphuturistical. Despite working his doughnuts off, Edward had to wait until he was 37 before he had his first one-man show and even then he didn't sell one single painting, which must have cheered him up no end.
Nevertheless, being an artist, not a commodities trader, he bashed on and eventually started creating and selling the evocative and atmospheric canvases of extremely ordinary places that several million art freaks now know and love, realising his genius for making somewhere as mundane as a filling station seem full of promise, menace and hidden mystery (as opposed to dullwits buying cheesy what-nots). Although his pictures seem to be populated by people called 'Lonely of Pennsylvania' and 'Desolate of New York', Edward said that he wasn't actually painting urban America's essential sterility and despair but was painting himself and that 'the man's the work'. As with many great painters, Ed's sheer wonderfulness only began being fully-appreciated by the average nighthawk in the diner after he slipped from life's wonky barstool in 1967.
NB Anoraks wishing to have convenient box to keep their pet Hoppers should choose the one marked American Realism.
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