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