] BIO
]
] 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%u2039Diego Velazquez, Francisco de Goya, Honore
] Daumier, Edouard Manet%u2039whose 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 one of
] Hopper's paintings was exhibited in the famous Armory
] Show of 1913 in New York City, his work excited little
] interest, and he was obliged to work principally as a c