Haskell's House

Two utility poles stand between us and an elaborate white house. The nearer pole on the right runs beyond the top of the picture; the slimmer one at the left carries a crossarm against the sky. Between them, bays, shutters, dark roof slopes and delicate ironwork make the building a densely articulated subject. Edward Hopper's Haskell's House combines architectural splendour with the interruptions of an ordinary street view.

Hopper made the work in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1924, recording the place and year in the inscription at the lower right. The National Gallery of Art identifies it as watercolour over graphite on paperboard, measuring 34.3 × 49.5 cm. It entered the collection in 1996 as a gift of Herbert A. Goldstone, accession 1996.130.2. ^[1]

A house seen from below

The ground rises steeply towards the entrance. A bright lawn occupies the lower slope, with clipped-looking hedges on either side of the central approach. At the right, a white fence follows a change of level above a retaining wall. The house is placed well above the street rather than sitting immediately beside the spectator.

That height changes our encounter with its façade. We look up towards the projecting bays and the roof, while the nearer ground conceals parts of the lower structure. The entrance appears at the top of the approach, a dark opening within a narrow porch.

The building is not shown squarely from the front. Its right-hand side extends away from us, and the projecting bay turns into a different light. This oblique view allows the façade to be understood through several connected planes. A purely frontal view would flatten much of that interplay.

The neighbouring houses help establish the terrain. Smaller yellow buildings appear to either side, partly hidden by the slope and main structure. Their fragmentary presence makes the central house look larger without disconnecting it from a populated neighbourhood.

A small figure wearing a hat is cut by the lower-left edge. It is easy to overlook beside the building's detail, yet its scale is useful. The figure belongs to the street level from which we look upwards. Nothing in the picture requires us to identify the person or connect them with the house's ownership.

Bays within bays

The house's projecting windows give the façade an unusually rich sequence of turns. A bay has its own front and angled sides, and each face receives a different amount of light. These smaller planes repeat within the larger body of the house.

The right-hand projection is particularly prominent. Its pale front is accompanied by cooler shaded surfaces, while a strong diagonal shadow crosses part of the lower wall. Above it, a dormer-like group emerges from the dark roof. The building seems to push outwards at several levels.

At the left, another projection answers it without appearing exactly identical. The viewpoint changes the proportions, and the surrounding shutters and shadows produce a different pattern. Repetition makes the façade coherent, while variation gives the eye reasons to move between its parts.

The narrow central entrance offers a quieter interval. Its dark doorway and small porch are held between the broader projections. Above it, further windows and trim continue the upward movement. The building has a discernible centre, though its many projecting forms keep it from feeling simply symmetrical.

At the highest level, a small rectangular feature and decorative cresting interrupt the roofline. Their thin, dark marks are set against a relatively open sky. This ornamental detail feels particularly delicate after the weight of the bays below.

The dark roof and its pale edges

The mansard roof is one of the work's strongest colour fields. Deep violet, grey and blue tones surround the upper windows, contrasting with the lighter trim and shutters. These dark passages gather the building's many projections into a more continuous upper mass.

Pale cornices repeatedly break that mass. They turn around corners and project above openings, sometimes reading as narrow horizontal bands and sometimes as angled edges. Their brightness makes the construction legible even where the roof itself is dark.

The shutters add a different kind of detail. Several appear green, with small marks suggesting their slatted surfaces. Their upright shapes frame the windows and answer the broader vertical bays. They remain practical attachments as well as elements in a pattern.

Ornament is not confined to the roof. Moulded surrounds and small decorative accents appear around the openings below. Hopper includes enough of them to make the building distinctive, but does not distribute the same degree of detail everywhere. The more open walls and lawn give these concentrated passages room to register.

Local researcher Catherine Ryan reports that Edward and Jo called the building the Wedding Cake House. Her Gloucester catalogue identifies its site near Main and Prospect Streets and distinguishes this 1924 view from the related 1923 Gloucester Mansions. The nickname suits the tiers and elaborate trim, though the work's formal title remains Haskell's House. ^[2]

The poles interrupt the view

The two poles are conspicuously unequal. The one at the left is relatively slender and ends within the sky, where its crossarm spreads sideways. The one at the right is much broader and continues beyond the picture's upper edge. Its closeness makes it an emphatic dark stripe.

That right-hand pole partly conceals the house. It passes in front of a section of the roof and wall, making the spectator look around it imaginatively. The interruption gives the view the character of a particular position on a street, where objects do not arrange themselves to provide an unobstructed architectural portrait.

The pole also divides the composition. To its left is most of the main house; to its right, a smaller yellow building, a tree, the fence and descending ground open a separate passage. The division is strong, but the continuing surfaces of land and fence connect the two sides.

The slimmer pole has another effect. Its slightly uneven silhouette stands against the sky and partly overlaps the lower left of the architectural group. It frames one side of the house without neatly matching the large upright at the right.

Together, the poles introduce plain utilitarian forms beside the decorative building. We can notice that difference without deciding that the entire picture is a verdict on modernity. Their immediate pictorial role is concrete: they obstruct, frame, divide and help measure the space between the spectator and the house.

Fences, hedges and changing levels

The white fence deserves a separate look. At the lower right it follows the boundary of the raised ground, its repeated narrow uprights giving the slope a visible measure. A gate-like section turns across the foreground, while the retaining wall beneath establishes a firmer edge.

These lines bring the architectural rhythm into the landscape. The house's repeated windows and shutters are larger and more elaborate; the fence translates repetition into a simpler series. Its changing direction also makes the lie of the ground easier to follow.

The hedges around the approach operate differently. Their rounded forms are fuller and less sharply divided. They make the entrance route apparent without showing every step, and their deep shadows set off the light ground nearby.

At the bottom edge, vegetation breaks into freer marks, with a few warmer passages among the greens. These areas are closer to us and less formally ordered than the house. Their looseness answers the foliage of the tree on the right, bringing the eye back down after its ascent through the roof.

The result is a carefully differentiated foreground. Street, figure, pole, fence, wall, vegetation and raised lawn occupy different distances. The house's prominence depends on that sequence of intervening things.

Watercolour on paperboard

The medium allows extensive variation within a nominally white building. Warm pale washes, cooler shaded areas and much darker accents describe the turning walls. Hopper makes the house bright without leaving it uniformly blank.

Some broad passages show variations within a wash. Other marks are narrow and deliberate, especially around ironwork, shutter slats and window surrounds. The distinction keeps the ornament from looking mechanically inscribed over an inert surface.

The catalogue identifies paperboard as the support and graphite as part of the work. ^[1] Drawing and colour work together in the finished image, allowing delicate marks to coexist with broad areas of wash.

A dark roof passage, for example, is not merely background behind a dormer. Its shape determines how brightly the pale edge appears. A light wall is similarly defined by the shadow falling across it. Colour and boundary continually help establish one another.

Bellows, Rehn and the museum history

Haskell's House was shown at Frank K. M. Rehn's New York gallery in 1924. The National Gallery's provenance records that it passed through Rehn's gallery to the artist George Bellows, then to Emma Story Bellows, before later ownership by the Goldstones and its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1996. ^[1]

Bellows's place in that history matters. Another American painter collected this watercolour relatively early in Hopper's public career. The picture's first audiences included fellow artists as well as the wider market developing around his New England work.

The year also brought a personal change. Edward and Jo married in July 1924 and spent their honeymoon in Gloucester. Their return followed the success of the previous summer's watercolours, including The Mansard Roof, acquired by the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. ^[3] The two Gloucester houses belong to successive summers, with different arrangements of architecture and surroundings.

The National Gallery's exhibition history records the watercolour in the MoMA retrospective of 1933 and the major Hopper exhibition of 2007–08. These appearances brought the Gloucester house before audiences at very different stages in his reputation. ^[1]

Looking back towards the street

Compared with The Mansard Roof, this house is less dominated by awnings and wind-stirred foliage. Its tiers, bays and decorative roofline receive a more sustained architectural emphasis. The two poles give the view an additional framework, keeping the spectator at the street below.

Adam's House offers another Gloucester encounter between dwelling, fence and utility pole. There, the house stands near the left edge and the view opens towards distant roofs. Haskell's House keeps a more imposing building at the centre, with smaller neighbours appearing around its sides.

The little figure near the lower-left edge remains a useful last point of attention. Its small size brings the architecture's scale back into focus. From that street-level fragment, the eye can climb past the hedges and porch, through the projecting bays, to the thin ironwork against the sky.