ON VIEW

A sense of austerity and emotional distance characterizes the work of Edward Hopper. Born in Nyack, New York, in 1882, Hopper studied art in New York City at the Correspondence School of Illustrating and the New York School of Art. In 1906 he went to Paris, where he lived and worked for extended periods until 1910. Although he initially supported himself through commercial illustration, Hopper was determined to be a painter. Much of his early work was influenced by his teachers at the New York School, primarily William Merritt Chase (q.v.) and Robert Henri (q.v.), but during the 1910s Hopper began to develop the spare and introspective realism that would mark his mature style.

In 1924 a successful exhibition of watercolors at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York enabled Hopper to become a full-time painter. As the American Scene movement gained momentum during the later part of the decade, Hopper's images of small-town America and the New England landscape gained a large following. Although Hopper eschewed the self-conscious local color of Thomas Hart Benton (q.v.) and Grant Wood (1892-1942), his work won a number of significant prizes during the 1930s. His style changed little over the remainder of his career, and despite the rise of Abstract Expressionism and other movements, Hopper remained consistently popular. The artist died in his New York studio in 1967.

The Bootleggers is an unusually dramatic painting for Hopper. It is sometime after dark, and in the foreground a motorboat churns along the bank of a river or tidal inlet. Occupying the boat are three men; backs to the viewer, they turn their heads in unison toward a large Victorian house rising above the shore. There a lone figure returns the men's gaze, establishing contact. A sense of brooding expectation suffuses the scene, and even without knowing of the painting's title, the viewer feels as if something illicit is in the offing.

When Hopper painted The Bootleggers in 1925, Prohibition was in full force and the smuggling of illegal liquor by both land and sea was a common practice. When the Currier Museum of Art acquired the painting in 1956, a writer for the Museum Bulletin noted that "Along the New England Coast there are doubtless many residents who will remember how, sometimes as dusk approached, the appearance of an unfamiliar launch proceeding cautiously toward open water meant the presence of a 'rum-runner.'"(1) Gazing at each other intently, yet making no overt signals, the figure on shore and those in the boat epitomize the furtive and wary movements of the professional smuggler. The stately house in the background, once the pride of a respectable family, stands as an ironic, even tragic foil to the present goings-on.

Muted colors and simplified forms contribute further to the compelling film noir effect of Hopper's image. Restricting his palette mainly to blues and grays, the artist suggests not only the time of day but the cheerless mood surrounding the criminal transaction. The trees in the distance as well as the nearer details of the landscape have been rendered as broad masses; like a stage set, they inform as to place but do not distract from the narrative action. Similarly, the setting of The Bootleggers is not based on any particular location but is, as Hopper's dealer pointed out, "a composite of places he had seen."(2)

The Bootleggers was exhibited for the first time at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1925. The painting was subsequently shown at the Rehn Gallery in 1927, after which it reverted to the artist's studio, remaining there until it was purchased by the Currier Museum of Art just over thirty years later. It has since appeared in numerous exhibitions of the artist's work and is today one of the Museum's outstanding examples of twentieth-century American painting.

VSD

NOTES

1. "A Painting by Edward Hopper," Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, February 1956, n.p.

2. John Clancy to Charles E. Buckley, February 27, 1956. Letter contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCES

"A Painting by Edward Hopper." Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, February, 1956, n.p.

Lloyd Goodrich. Edward Hopper. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971.

Gail Levin. Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980.