Edward Hopper was an American painter whose highly
individualistic works are landmarks of American realism. His
paintings embody in art a particular American 20th-century
sensibility that is characterized by isolation, melancholy, and
loneliness.

Hopper was born on July 22, 1882, in Nyack, New York, and studied
illustration in New York City at a commercial art school from 1899 to
1900. Around 1901 he switched to painting and studied at the New
York School of Art until 1906, largely under Robert Henri. He made
three trips to Europe between 1906 and 1910 but remained
unaffected by current French and Spanish experiments in cubism. He
was influenced mainly by the great European realists—Diego
Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, Edouard
Manet—whose work had first been introduced to him by his New York
City teachers. His early paintings, such as Le pavillon de flore (1909,
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City), were
committed to realism and exhibited some of the basic characteristics
that he was to retain throughout his career: compositional style
based on simple, large geometric forms; flat masses of color; and the
use of architectural elements in his scenes for their strong verticals,
horizontals, and diagonals.

Although Hopper's work was outside the mainstream of
mid-20th-century abstraction, his simplified schematic style was
one of the influences on the later representational revival and on pop
art. He died May 15, 1967, in New York City.