Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape

A fresh look at one of America’s best-known and beloved artists at a pivotal but little-known moment in his life that profoundly shaped both his art and career.

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann tells the largely ignored but significant origin story of Edward Hopper’s years in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts — a period and place that imbued Hopper’s paintings with a clarity and purpose that had eluded his earlier work. This volume focuses on summers Hopper spent there in the 1920s, starting in 1923, when he first embraced watercolor during outdoor painting excursions on Cape Ann and discovered one of his favorite subjects: houses and vernacular architecture. The success of Hopper’s Gloucester watercolors transformed his work in all media and set the stage for his monumental career.

Accompanying a major retrospective at the Cape Ann Museum, including an unprecedented loan of twenty-eight works from the Whitney Museum of American Art, this highly readable and beautifully illustrated volume reveals in great depth the lesser-known story about the influence of a young painter, Josephine Nivison, who became not only Hopper’s wife but also the most trusted force underlying his artistic confidence. Here she is recast as principal producer of Hopper’s distinctive style and his “brand” visionary from the time of their courtship until his death in 1967.

About the Author:

Elliot Bostwick Davis is a former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the John Moors Cabot Chair at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and director of the Norton Museum. She has published extensively on American art, including Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Mary Cassatt, and Jamie Wyeth, as well as on African American artists.