Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape

By Elliot Bostwick Davis

Edward Hopper & Cape Ann offers a fresh look at one of America’s best-known and beloved artists at a pivotal but little-known moment in his life that profoundly shaped both his art and career. Davis tells the largely ignored but significant origin story of Edward Hopper’s years in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts—a period and place that imbued Hopper’s paintings with a clarity and purpose that had eluded his earlier work. This volume focuses on summers Hopper spent there in the 1920s, starting in 1923, when he first embraced watercolor during outdoor painting excursions on Cape Ann and discovered one of his favorite subjects: houses and vernacular architecture. The success of Hopper’s Gloucester watercolors transformed his work in all media and set the stage for his monumental career.

The catalogue accompanied a major retrospective during Summer 2023 at the Cape Ann Museum that included an unprecedented loan of twenty-eight works from the Whitney Museum of American Art. This highly readable and beautifully illustrated volume reveals in great depth the lesser-known story about the influence of a young painter, Josephine Nivison, who became not only Hopper’s wife but also the most trusted force underlying his artistic confidence. Here she is recast as principal producer of Hopper’s distinctive style and his “brand” visionary from the time of their courtship until his death in 1967.

The catalogue recently placed as a finalist in the 2024 Alfred H. Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions.

Softcover, 224 Pages, 11.41 x 1.09 x 10.29".145 Color Images; 39 Black & White Images.

Copyright 2023 Elliot Bostwick Davis with Rizzoli Electa.