Edward Hopper valuation
Painted empty rooms, all-night diners and New England light, and made American solitude his subject.
Edward Hopper was born at Nyack, New York, in 1882 and studied at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri.
What a work by Edward Hopper is worth
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Bio
Edward Hopper was born at Nyack, New York, in 1882 and studied at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri. He worked for years as a commercial illustrator and made his name first with etchings in the late 1910s and early 1920s, then with watercolours; the Brooklyn Museum bought one of his Gloucester watercolours in 1923. He married the painter Josephine Nivison in 1924, and she kept his records and posed for almost every woman in his paintings. House by the Railroad was given to the Museum of Modern Art in 1930, the first oil painting in its collection, and Nighthawks of 1942 is in the Art Institute of Chicago. He lived and worked in the same studio on Washington Square from 1913 until his death in 1967.
Hopper's oils are scarce in private hands. Jo Hopper left the contents of the studio to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and most of the major paintings are in museums. What comes to market more often is the etchings, watercolours and drawings, along with a great many posters and reproductions of Nighthawks and other images, which are not his work. For an etching, the impression, the paper and the signature are the questions; for anything else, a place in Gail Levin's catalogue raisonné is expected.
The Armory Show, Washington Square and Cape Cod
Hopper sold his first painting, Sailing, at the Armory Show of 1913, and his first solo exhibition of paintings, at the Frank Rehn Gallery in 1924, sold out. The Whitney gave him retrospectives in 1950 and 1964.
From 1934 the Hoppers spent their summers in a house and studio they built at South Truro on Cape Cod, and its light and plain buildings run through his later work. His boyhood home at Nyack is now the Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
