Watercolours

A pale awning lifts away from a dark roof. A utility pole crosses the view of a hillside house. In Mexico, a cinema sign rises among ochre walls beneath distant mountains. Edward Hopper's watercolours bring architecture into contact with changing light, allowing broad washes and small drawn accents to describe places encountered on his travels.

Watercolour was central to his public recognition in the 1920s and remained an important part of his work long afterwards. It offered a way to paint outside New York, to explore particular buildings and to make light visible through the relation of colour to a pale support. These pictures deserve attention as works with their own subjects and material character.

Before the Gloucester breakthrough

The important summer of 1923 was not Hopper's first encounter with the medium. The Art Institute of Chicago's chronology records a solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club in October 1922 containing ten watercolours and a group of prints. In Gloucester the following summer, he painted more than seventeen watercolours. ^[1] The distinction matters: an existing practice became a major opportunity rather than appearing suddenly from nothing.

Gloucester offered more than a picturesque waterfront. Houses rose on irregular ground, roofs overlapped and roads introduced changing viewpoints. These subjects allowed Hopper to connect a building's structure with the conditions surrounding it: sunlight on a wall, vegetation near a porch or a dark opening beneath a roof.

The pictures often make the spectator aware of where the painter has chosen to stand. A house may rise above the eye, appear across a street or be partly concealed by another form. That selected position is as important as the building's identity. It determines which surfaces catch the light and which features become hidden.

Architecture also provides a framework for colour. A wall can hold a broad wash; a window can supply a concentrated dark; a roof edge can separate two adjacent tones. These ordinary elements give Hopper ways to construct a picture without turning every part of the scene into equally detailed description.

Jo Nivison and a shared artistic summer

Josephine Nivison was already an exhibiting painter when she encouraged Hopper's watercolour work. Gail Levin's study of Jo describes their Gloucester summer and her advocacy when the Brooklyn Museum invited her to participate in its 1923 watercolour exhibition. Edward's work was included alongside hers, with six pictures by each artist. ^[2]

The museum bought The Mansard Roof for $100. Jo sold none of her exhibited works. Levin relates those different outcomes to the subsequent imbalance in the artists' recognition, drawing partly on a joint interview recorded in 1966. ^[2] Jo's intervention belongs to her activity as an artist with professional connections, as well as to the history of Edward's career.

The following year brought a solo exhibition, Recent Watercolors by Edward Hopper, at the Frank K. M. Rehn Galleries. The Art Institute dates it to October 1924 and records eleven works, including Haskell's House, purchased by George Bellows. ^[1] The exhibition helped turn the Gloucester achievement into a continuing relationship with a dealer and buyers.

The sequence gives watercolour a concrete place in Hopper's development. An artist who had struggled for recognition found an audience for views of buildings and places outside the metropolitan subjects most closely associated with his name today.

Jo at work on the beach

Hopper also made watercolours of Jo working. The Whitney's Jo Sketching at Good Harbor Beach, dated 1923–1924, records watercolour and fabricated chalk on paper, accession 70.1129, Josephine N. Hopper Bequest. ^[3] The additional drawing material is a reminder that his works on paper do not all have an identical medium description.

Jo sits on pale sand in a broad-brimmed hat, with a board or pad across her lap. Her blue clothing forms a substantial mass against the beach, while her extended legs and the slant of the shore carry the eye towards the left. Behind her, blue water separates the sand from a green headland with buildings.

The pale foreground has considerable space around the figure. A few cooler marks suggest disturbed sand and shadow, but much remains open. The blue of the clothing and the sea therefore gains strength through its relation to lighter surrounding areas.

The picture shows an artist engaged in looking and working within a coastal setting. It also gives Jo a different role from that of an anonymous figure in an interior. Her activity belongs directly to the artistic summer in which both painters were making work.

What the medium makes possible

Watercolour combines pigment with a water-soluble binder, commonly gum arabic. Applied in relatively transparent washes, it allows the lightness of the support to contribute to the effect of colour. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's account explains how damp surfaces encourage softer spreading edges, while drier applications can produce firmer boundaries. ^[4]

Those general properties help explain the range visible in Hopper's pictures. A broad sky can remain relatively open while a window is sharply accented. Colour can gather along one edge and become thinner elsewhere, giving a wall variation without modelling it as densely as an oil-painted surface.

The difference between an edge and an area is especially useful. A short mark can establish a roofline, while a wash gives the adjoining roof its extent. A darker stroke can suggest a post or shutter, leaving the spectator to understand its place within a larger, more lightly described structure.

Brightness does not depend only on applying a conspicuous light colour. A pale area can gain force through the darker shapes beside it. Awnings, walls and skies can therefore appear luminous through their relationships across the sheet.

A reproduction, however, does not establish exactly how every pale passage was made. Unpainted support, thin paint and later handling can have different appearances. Looking closely at the visible result is more useful than assigning an unsupported technical explanation to each small light mark.

Paper, board and drawing materials

The materials vary from work to work. The National Gallery of Art records Haskell's House as watercolour and graphite on paperboard. ^[5] The relatively specific support description distinguishes it from the many works catalogued simply as watercolour on paper.

Wichita Art Museum identifies charcoal, rather than graphite, alongside watercolour in Adam's House. ^[6] These distinctions affect how we understand the meeting of line and colour. A dark drawn accent need not have been made by the same implement in every picture.

Graphite appears in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's records for House by the Squam River and Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine. ^[7] Drawing and watercolour were compatible parts of Hopper's practice: an underlying structure could coexist with washes that varied considerably in density and freedom.

The material descriptions also help separate a finished watercolour from a preparatory drawing for an oil. Both may involve paper and a drawing implement, but that shared support does not make them interchangeable. The purpose and visual completeness of the particular work remain important.

A light mark is not always untouched paper

The Cleveland Museum of Art's Lighthouse Village, also known as Cape Elizabeth, gives a particularly useful material example. Its current record identifies watercolour with graphite and scraping on cream wove paper. The work dates from 1929, and the sheet measures 40.5 × 63.3 cm. Scraping is part of the documented medium, alongside the more familiar application of colour. ^[8]

This matters when we describe the luminosity of Hopper's watercolours. Some bright areas may depend on paper that has received little colour. Others can be produced or modified by working on a surface already painted. A reproduction lets us examine the distribution of light, but it does not necessarily allow every pale fleck to be assigned to one procedure.

The distinction also changes the idea of watercolour as a medium permitting no revision. Removing or disturbing colour can be part of its handling, as can returning with another wash or a drawn mark. The available choices differ from those of oil paint, but they do not reduce painting on paper to one irreversible encounter.

In Lighthouse Village, narrow pale accents give parts of the roofs and buildings a crisp presence within a much softer environment. We can describe that visible contrast without pretending to identify, from a small reproduction, every place where Hopper scraped the sheet. The object record supplies secure evidence of the technique; the image shows the larger organisation in which it operates.

Houses seen from changing positions

The Mansard Roof gives architectural ornament an unusually animated setting. Dormers, shutters and chimneys rise above pale awnings, while foliage crosses the building at either side. The roof is understood through many interruptions, and the curved fabric brings a softer rhythm beneath its angular forms.

Haskell's House places the building above rising ground. Utility poles intervene in the view, introducing narrow uprights that belong to the surrounding street. They complicate the house's outline and prevent it from appearing as an isolated specimen of architecture.

Adam's House opens the scene towards a street corner and more distant buildings. The main house becomes part of an urban arrangement, with neighbouring roofs and open ground helping establish scale.

These views show how much variety Hopper found in a shared subject. The interest is not simply that three houses look different. Each picture establishes a different relationship between the spectator, the building and the space around it.

One house may loom, another may turn away, and another may be interrupted by poles or foliage. Watercolour gives those changing relationships a visible economy: a broad surface, an accented edge and a carefully placed dark can carry a considerable amount of spatial information.

Three houses and a lighthouse

The same Cleveland watercolour can be read from the bottom of the sheet upwards. A broad foreground of yellowish and green land comes first. Beyond it stand three low houses, followed by a rising green area and the taller lighthouse group. The arrangement makes distance through successive bands of differently occupied ground.

The houses are related but not interchangeable. Their pale walls differ in temperature, from cooler off-white to yellow and pink. Dark roof planes join these separate colours into a more continuous rhythm. Chimneys introduce small warm uprights above that rhythm, while porches and windows break up the wall surfaces below.

The lighthouse rises behind rather than beside the nearer row. Its narrow, pale shaft reaches into the sky and ends in a darker lantern. This tall form gives a focus to a scene otherwise dominated by low buildings and horizontal ground. The adjacent structure is partly held within the green slope, making the tower's height especially conspicuous.

The museum connects the buildings with the people who worked there: lighthouse keepers and coast guard families. Their different functions help explain why this is a group of occupied structures rather than a picturesque collection of unrelated forms. ^[8] The painting does not need to show a person at every doorway to make the settlement legible.

Foreground colour has a different kind of freedom. Broader horizontal passages describe land without accounting for each stem or clump. Their variation keeps the lower part of the picture active, yet the houses retain the more decisive edges. Hopper distributes precision according to the needs of the composition.

The sky is not simply a blank strip left above the roofs. Pale changes and cloud-like passages give it a different texture from the field. Across the whole sheet, land, architecture and atmosphere are described at different levels of detail. Their differences make them belong together.

Buildings within the surrounding land

The New England watercolours also connect architecture to larger terrain. In House by the Squam River, the structure is seen in relation to the land and water around it. The setting gives the house a particular place rather than leaving it suspended against an undifferentiated backdrop.

Hill and Houses, Cape Elizabeth, Maine makes the slope itself a major part of the picture. Architecture punctuates the terrain, while open areas allow the rise and fall of the land to remain visible.

Such pictures reward attention to the intervals between buildings. A stretch of ground, a gap in vegetation or a band of sky can determine how far one form seems from another. Hopper's economy is often most apparent in these quieter passages, where relatively few marks establish a useful amount of space.

The same approach allows practical structures to participate in a landscape. A road, pole or railway line can change the direction of looking and bring a different human use into the view. The relationship between building and terrain need not depend on a person being visible.

Drawing carries the structure, colour changes the weight

In the architectural watercolours, a gable or roof can remain understandable through relatively few lines. This allows colour to do more than fill a diagram. A cool passage can set one wall back, while a warm one brings the adjacent face forward. The junction between them may establish a corner more effectively than a heavy outline.

At other points, a dark stroke carries both structure and emphasis. A window can be a physical opening, an interruption in a light wall and one of several accents distributed across the page. Its role depends on its relationship to the surrounding washes. Adding equal detail to every window would change that balance.

The graphite or charcoal identified in individual records should therefore be considered as part of the image's thinking. Drawing can survive within a finished watercolour without being a preliminary scaffolding that the painter failed to conceal. Its finer lines can remain useful beside much broader passages of the brush.

The support contributes another scale of variation. A sheet has edges and a surface that can remain visible between marks. The contrast between worked and lightly touched areas becomes part of the picture's rhythm, especially where a building meets open sky or where a foreground is described with a few broad strokes.

These effects do not all point towards speed. An abbreviated passage may be a deliberate conclusion reached after sustained attention. A more densely worked one may preserve an early choice or a later adjustment. Appearance alone cannot turn the entire sheet into a timed record of a single outdoor session.

Working outside did not always mean working quickly

Hopper described a distinction between his oil-painting preparations and his watercolours in a 1960 interview with Katharine Kuh, as transmitted by Gail Levin. Drawings could be assembled into a painting, whereas he associated his watercolours with direct work outdoors from nature. Levin also notes the pencil outlines sometimes visible beneath the colour. ^[9]

Direct outdoor work still allowed difficulty, return visits and selection. Franklin Kelly's catalogue entry for Cottages at North Truro describes its repeated sessions in autumn 1938. Jo's diary entries for 2, 6 and 9 November, quoted through Levin's catalogue raisonné, record the continuing search for a satisfactory sky. ^[10]

That account changes the familiar image of a watercolour completed in one effortless burst. Hopper could work from a place while waiting for conditions that suited the picture. The sky was part of an evolving arrangement, requiring judgment after other portions were already underway.

Kelly places the work before a gap in Hopper's watercolour production lasting until summer 1941. ^[10] The medium's importance therefore did not imply an uninterrupted annual routine. Its use belonged to the changing rhythms of travel, health and work.

Jo's blue-barked tree offers another kind of watercolour

Josephine Nivison Hopper's undated Tree in Woods, Bluish Bark, preserved in the Edward Hopper House's Sanborn collection, offers a valuable companion to Edward's architectural subjects. A broad blue-grey trunk fills most of its upright sheet. Branches turn outwards near the upper edge and a strong diagonal limb reaches towards the left. Finer, paler trunks continue behind it. ^[11]

The blue is striking because it belongs to an object we would usually name through browns and greys. Jo varies it with darker and warmer interruptions, allowing knots, scars and turns in the bark to remain visible. The trunk has volume without being uniformly modelled from one side to the other.

Behind it, the trees are narrower and less heavily worked. Their verticals can be followed through a pale field that stays open between the marks. Thin lateral branches give that field a delicate structure, contrasting with the weight of the principal trunk.

The ground introduces warmer orange-brown passages at the tree's base. Their broken edges and open intervals make a different kind of surface from the bark. The roots spread into this area, joining the central upright to the lower corners of the sheet.

This is a useful comparison with Lighthouse Village because both works establish a dominant upright among supporting forms. Their actual choices differ. Edward places a narrow tower above a low settlement; Jo brings the main tree close enough to fill and partly exceed the boundaries of the page. One picture asks us to see a group across open ground, the other to confront a trunk within a wood.

Jo's handling also demonstrates why the couple's shared use of watercolour should not be reduced to a story in which she merely encouraged his discovery of the medium. Her surviving sheet makes independent decisions about colour, proximity and the amount of surrounding space a subject needs. The two practices can be compared through what their pictures actually do.

Mexico and a different architectural setting

Mexico extended the geography of the watercolours. The Art Institute's chronology records the Hoppers' 1943 journey by train during wartime petrol restrictions and their return in 1946. ^[1] These travels brought mountain cities and different architectural forms into a practice already established through New England subjects.

El Palacio, painted in 1946, is catalogued by the Whitney as watercolour and graphite pencil on paper. ^[12] A vertical cinema sign interrupts pale and ochre buildings, while overlapping mountain profiles extend behind the roofs.

The arrangement carries some familiar interests into a new location. Large walls catch the light, dark openings punctuate them, and the spectator sees one structure through the partial obstruction of another. The mountains introduce a more extensive surrounding field, but the city remains a sequence of particular surfaces.

The work also broadens the association between Hopper and cinema. A theatre could be a destination named by a sign, a large architectural mass and part of a city's skyline. Painting it outside allows the entertainment building to participate in the landscape without depicting a performance or audience.

Revisiting the Gloucester houses through photography

Hopper's watercolours have also provided starting points for later artists. In Hopper Redux, exhibited in 2012, Gail Albert Halaban returned to the Gloucester locations associated with his paintings of the 1920s. The gallery's release describes carefully staged photographs using lighting, people, props and work after the exposure. ^[13]

Such a project makes a distinction between a building that survives and an image that can be repeated. A later photograph can revisit a house, but its light, occupation and visible surroundings belong to another occasion. The watercolour remains an arrangement of marks made on a particular support.

The shift of medium also changes what counts as selection. Hopper could abbreviate a lawn through a wash, omit a detail or make an adjoining wall a broader plane. A staged photograph can organise people and objects before the camera, then adjust the resulting image. Both require decisions, although those decisions operate through different materials and procedures.

Halaban's project therefore offers a useful way of returning to the earlier pictures. The buildings are neither imaginary in every respect nor merely neutral containers for a supposed Hopper mood. They supplied subjects from which an artist made images; another artist can encounter those subjects and produce a different account.

Looking again at a watercolour after such a comparison, a small change of viewpoint becomes consequential. A roof may meet the horizon differently, a side wall may become more or less visible, and the amount of foreground may expand. The recognisable house remains, while the relations that make the picture are transformed.

A continuing place in exhibitions

Watercolours remained visible alongside Hopper's oils as his reputation developed. The Art Institute's chronology records thirty-seven in his 1933 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, alongside twenty-five oils and eleven etchings. In 1945, Lloyd Goodrich's American Watercolor and Winslow Homer at the Walker Art Center included nine works by Hopper; he and John Marin had the largest representation among living artists. ^[1]

These exhibitions show the medium's continuing public importance. The Gloucester success was an early turning point, but watercolour was also part of how museums presented Hopper's achievement during his mature career.

It offers a useful route into the breadth of that achievement today. Houses, coastal buildings, open ground and Mexican streets complicate an account based mainly on diners and city interiors. They reveal an artist repeatedly testing what a selected position and a changing distribution of light could do with a particular place.

Exhibition scale and the intimate work of a sheet

The watercolours can appear especially direct beside Hopper's large, constructed oils. Yet their relatively intimate scale has its own demands. Fine changes of colour and a short drawn edge can bear more attention when a viewer stands close to a work on paper than they might in a larger canvas seen across a room.

This helps explain why a subject such as a row of houses can sustain a substantial image without a conspicuous human episode. Differences in wall colour, roof angle and spacing become events in their own right. The painter's decisions determine which of them attracts the eye first and which remains available on a slower inspection.

The relation with oil painting is consequently more varied than a contrast between spontaneous studies and finished masterpieces. Some watercolours establish complete compositions. Some drawings prepare oils. Some subjects, materials and habits recur across both, but the finished works have to be considered through the particular support and scale on which they operate.

A productive comparison begins with one visible problem: how a white building receives shade, how a tall form rises above lower ones, or how much open ground should precede a house. Following that problem across media reveals a continuing practice without making one medium the servant of the other.

Looking between the watercolours and oils

Comparing the two media can sharpen attention without making one a standard against which to judge the other. A watercolour may leave broad areas lightly described, while an oil gives a wall a more continuous opaque surface. Both can make architecture emphatic through a small number of carefully related shapes.

The subject alone does not determine that process. A lighthouse painted in oil and a coastal building painted in watercolour may belong to similar places while asking different things of their materials. Close comparison begins with what is visible in each work: its edges, intervals, marks and treatment of a pale surface.

For a first route through Hopper's watercolours, begin with the awnings and dormers of The Mansard Roof, then move to the interrupted hillside view of Haskell's House. Adam's House opens the scene towards a street, while House by the Squam River places the building within a broader landscape. El Palacio carries those questions of architecture, viewpoint and light into Mexico.

Across these different subjects, the pleasure lies in the changing decisions. A wash spreads, an edge becomes firm, a dark opening establishes depth, and a pale wall catches the eye. Hopper's watercolours make those acts of looking and construction unusually available to the spectator.