"Maybe I am not very human, all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.", Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker, widely regarded as the most important American realist of the twentieth century. Born in Nyack, New York, into a middle-class family, he trained at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and, decisively, under Robert Henri, the painter at the centre of the Ashcan School. Three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 brought him into contact with contemporary French painting at first hand, but he resisted the European avant-garde's formal experiments and committed himself to an austere, light-driven American realism that he would refine over the next half-century. He showed work in the 1913 Armory Show but supported himself for nearly fifteen years afterward as a commercial illustrator and etcher; the breakthrough recognition arrived in the mid-1920s, the same year he married the painter Josephine "Jo" Verstille Nivison.
His mature oils, watercolors, and etchings, among them House by the Railroad (1925), Early Sunday Morning (1930), Gas (1940), and Nighthawks (1942), define a particular vision of urban and small-town American life characterized by silence, hard light, and emotional reserve. His work is held in essentially every major American museum, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, which received the entire estate of his and his wife's holdings, some 2,500 paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings, by Jo Hopper's bequest in 1968. Nighthawks hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago; other major works are at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.