Edward Hopper's First Oils Were Copies, New Biography Reveals

Edward Hopper's first oil paintings were not views of his home town at all. They were copies. A new biography traces every one of the oils he made before art school back to its original source.

Around age 13, Hopper turned the attic of his family home in Nyack, New York, a river town north of New York City, into a makeshift studio. His probable first oil, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, is signed and dated 1895. At least five more finished oils followed before he enrolled in art school.

Those small canvases stayed in the attic. They sat unseen for decades. After Hopper's death they were found, put on show and described as his first original compositions in oil.

The new research tells a different story. Old Ice Pond at Nyack, painted between 1898 and 1900, and Rowboat in Rocky Cove have no link to Nyack beyond their later titles. Both are faithful copies after paintings by other hands, according to an extract from the biography published by The Art Newspaper.

Old Ice Pond at Nyack follows A Winter Sunset by Bruce Crane, an American painter linked with tonalism, a style built on soft, muted colour. Rowboat in Rocky Cove follows Lake View, a watercolour by a painter whose name is not recorded. All of the early copies but one, Church and landscape, carry Hopper's signature.

Many of the pictures the teenage Hopper copied had appeared in popular periodicals of the day. They were often printed with step-by-step instructions for amateurs to copy. Two of the sources were illustrations in The Art Interchange, a magazine aimed at amateur artists.

Even the titles are later additions. The Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn found the group in the attic of Hopper's childhood home in the late 1960s. He gave Old Ice Pond at Nyack its name shortly after the artist's death. He called the boat picture Rowboat on Hudson.

The detective work began years ago. Author Louis Shadwick was a graduate student in London when he first matched the early works to their printed sources. His book, Edward Hopper, is published by Yale University Press in New Haven, Connecticut, and is described by the publisher as drawing on major new archives and newly discovered sources.

For fans, this changes little about the later Hopper and much about the young one. A teenager copying prints in an attic is a familiar start. It shows a learner at work, brush in hand, long before the streets and light he would later paint.