How a student discovered Edward Hopper started as an art imitator
There is no doubt that Edward Hopper’s rendering of American solitude is one of the most significant contributions to 20th-century art. As one of the finest American realists, he captured the country’s fragmenting social structure as it emerged out of the Great Depression. But in 2020, doubts emerged about the authenticity of his earlier work, and as one PhD student eventually proved, they were copies of other artworks.
Louis Shadwick made the bombshell claim that Hopper didn’t paint “a single original oil painting until he enrolled at the New York School of Art in the autumn of 1900”. Shadwick wrote his PhD on Hopper’s early career works at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and, through tireless research that involved scouring the internet for thousands of paintings, found Hopper had been more of a keen imitator than a pioneer in the beginning.
Before delving into the American subconscious, Hopper was painting nature scenes. There were fishermen, boats, and rivers, all charming but lacking his distinct touch. He was born into a middle-class Nyack family, who always gently encouraged his artistry and bought him materials. Up until Shadwick’s research, it was thought his earliest paintings were all studies of his surroundings growing up.
They were only discovered after Hopper died, squirrelled away in an attack in his family home. Shadwick quickly noticed the connection between Hopper’s childhood home and his earliest paintings. As part of his research on how the two intersected, he stumbled across a book with landscapes that were eerily similar to Hopper’s.
Bruce Crane was the tonalist painter behind them. Shadwick followed his instinct, soon leafing through pages of auction websites for similar works by Crane. It worked, and he found an exact match for a Hopper painting. Old Ice Pond at Nyack, a teenage Hopper piece, turned out to be a copy of Crane’s A Winter Sunset. Shadwick told The Art Newspaper that “the dots were joining”, describing it as a “Eureka moment”.
Many more months of research followed, and Shadwick learned Crane’s painting had been featured in a magazine geared towards art students. That tiny nugget of information led him to another watercolour, which was unattributed but a perfect match for the first oil painting Hopper ever signed, Rowboat In Rocky Cove. Sahdwick sincerely believes that Hopper was honing his craft, never intending to pass these works as his own – but they were misinterpreted when he died.
“Decades of early Hopper scholarship cultivated the idea of a totally original talent, with no influences, that spoke to the American myth of the lonesome male,” Shadwick explained. “What we need to do as art historians is take to task this idea of American individualism and bring it back down to earth. It’s not about trying to tarnish the artist, but being truthful that he was learning to paint via the same methods as so many other art students at that time.”
Although they weren’t his own, that Hopper was able to replicate the work of an established artist in his mid-teens spoke to his innate ability. Although it wasn’t cultivated entirely by himself, it shows why he went on to become such a prolific painter when he established his own vision.
