Edward Hopper Light and Dark by Souter Gerry

Author:Souter, Gerry. [Souter, Gerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781783107582
Publisher: Parkstone International

71. Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947. Oil on canvas, 71.1 x 101.6 cm.

The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

72. Sunday, 1926. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 86.4 cm.

The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

After briefly exploring Eastport and Bangor, Maine, the Hoppers arrived in the tumbledown fishing town of Rockland, and Edward plunged into one of his most rewarding and prolific periods. He lost himself among the antique houses and storage buildings, the rough landscape and other leavings of eras long past.

One unusual watercolour, Civil War Campground, taps into Hopper’s love of history. A vista that most Realist artists of the time would have seen as devoid of any redeeming qualities is translated with attention to both design and symbolism. During the early days of the Civil War, Maine had been among the first to answer President Lincoln’s call for volunteer regiments. It was on this Tillson’s Hill that ten companies of troops assembled and bivouacked before marching off to add their names to the roll call of 73,000 soldiers who came from the “Pine Tree” state. Somewhere on the hill, a stone tablet marks the occasion.

Hopper portrays a golden grassy hill ridge, beyond which a house roof is visible and the gully then rises to the distant forested crest of a far hill. Three thick utility poles – often a Hopper compositional device – thrust up from the golden ridgeline. They carry telephone circuits, demonstrated by their small glass insulators, as the future leaps across what is now history. Hopper had always left his poles devoid of wires, but here he lightly sketches them in against a bald sky.

Besides bearing witness to times gone by, Hopper returned to his railway imagery in Railroad Crossing. This is an example of dynamic brushwork and composition rendering a simple scene into a deeply realised layering of light from the gravel road that crosses the tracks to the vigorous dark writhing forms of trees that almost obscure the shops and buildings at the bottom of the hill. All lines lead the eye in a rush toward the left of the composition as though a train has just raced through. A railway warning sign on the left – minus one arm – points us back into the picture. Trains hurry past this community, never pausing to look back.

More typical is Haunted House, a boarded-up storehouse among other storehouses that holds its hundreds of smells in layers of detritus left behind as ghosts from thousands of cargoes stowed in its cavernous interior. Painted quickly amid the wind-stirred golden grass, the cluster of abandoned, peak-roofed storehouses form a group that is valuable now only for its salt-scoured lumber used as panelling in rich men’s dens.

Down near the shore Hopper found beached beam trawlers: Beam Trawler Osprey and Bow of Beam Trawler Widgeon waiting for dismantling and the cutter’s torch. Once this community was redolent with the sharp miasma of fish and coal-fired steam and heard the clank of iron winches and the squeaking heave of bulging hemp nets. Now the shore stinks of old trawlers’ rust, long rotted fish scales and puddled oil underfoot.

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