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Lot Essay
Executed 1922.
Beginning in 1914, Edward Hopper regularly summered in Gloucester, Massachusetts. While painting and drawing in Gloucester, Hopper avoided the conventional subject matter associated with the busy commercial fishing port and instead looked inward to the town's simple neighborhoods. He noted that while other artists were painting the waterfront, he preferred to look at the town's houses. Of Hopper's interest in Gloucester architecture, Lloyd Goodrich wrote, "He liked the spare New England character of this seaside town; the white wooden houses and churches of the early years...Like every realist, Hopper loved character, and these varied structures were exactly characterized as a portrait painter's sitters. And above all, he loved the play of sunlight and shadow on their forms, the way a white-painted clapboard wall looked under the baking sun...Hopper was painting an honest portrait of an American town, with all its native character, its familiar ugliness and beauties...He preferred American architecture in its unashamed provincial phases, growing out of the character of the people." (Edward Hopper, New York, 1971, pp. 53-54)
House and Trees, Gloucester is a precursor to Hopper's watercolors of Gloucester painted one year later in the summer of 1923, which explore the unique, vernacular architecture of the town and won the artist critical acclaim. Goodrich wrote that these watercolors were the first depictions of "houses and streets that were to become his first generally known type of subject--for a while, one might say, his trademark." (Edward Hopper)
In House and Trees, Gloucester, Hopper focuses not on the white wooden house exclusively but on the two monumental trees in the center of the drawing as well. As is true with much of his work, the drawing exists as a study of light and dark and its effect on the overall mood of the work. The stark contrast between the dark shady foliage and the sun dappled grass and house manages to imply the feelings of detachment that permeates so much of Hopper's work.
Beginning in 1914, Edward Hopper regularly summered in Gloucester, Massachusetts. While painting and drawing in Gloucester, Hopper avoided the conventional subject matter associated with the busy commercial fishing port and instead looked inward to the town's simple neighborhoods. He noted that while other artists were painting the waterfront, he preferred to look at the town's houses. Of Hopper's interest in Gloucester architecture, Lloyd Goodrich wrote, "He liked the spare New England character of this seaside town; the white wooden houses and churches of the early years...Like every realist, Hopper loved character, and these varied structures were exactly characterized as a portrait painter's sitters. And above all, he loved the play of sunlight and shadow on their forms, the way a white-painted clapboard wall looked under the baking sun...Hopper was painting an honest portrait of an American town, with all its native character, its familiar ugliness and beauties...He preferred American architecture in its unashamed provincial phases, growing out of the character of the people." (Edward Hopper, New York, 1971, pp. 53-54)
House and Trees, Gloucester is a precursor to Hopper's watercolors of Gloucester painted one year later in the summer of 1923, which explore the unique, vernacular architecture of the town and won the artist critical acclaim. Goodrich wrote that these watercolors were the first depictions of "houses and streets that were to become his first generally known type of subject--for a while, one might say, his trademark." (Edward Hopper)
In House and Trees, Gloucester, Hopper focuses not on the white wooden house exclusively but on the two monumental trees in the center of the drawing as well. As is true with much of his work, the drawing exists as a study of light and dark and its effect on the overall mood of the work. The stark contrast between the dark shady foliage and the sun dappled grass and house manages to imply the feelings of detachment that permeates so much of Hopper's work.