Edward Hopper show in Gloucester, Mass., looks at his summers there

Jun 29, 2023

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — How well do you know your Ed Hopper?

The question almost sounds insolent because, of course, America’s favorite 20th-century painter was not “Ed.” He was very much Edward. Reserved. A bit stiff (like his nudes). Anglo-Saxon. A connoisseur of solitude.

Edward Hopper to you and me.

On the other hand, we know his wife, who was born Josephine Nivison, as Jo.

Jo entered Hopper’s life in a big way in 1923. A marvelous show at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Mass., marks the centenary of this momentous year. “Edward Hopper and Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape” opened on Hopper’s birthday — July 22.

The show’s focus is on the work he made during summer visits to Cape Ann, an hour northeast of Boston, in the 1920s. But it also goes to considerable lengths to tell the story of Jo, who is recast (according to the catalogue’s dust flap) “as principal producer of Hopper’s distinctive style and his ‘brand’ visionary from the time of their marriage in 1924 until his death in 1967.”

To say that someone other than Edward Hopper produced Edward Hopper’s style is a big, strange-sounding claim. Labeling Jo a “‘brand’ visionary,” meanwhile, sounds like a wacky anachronism. But even if you don’t accept the terminology, there are uncomfortable truths lurking behind both claims, and this show dares to go there.

The exhibit comes with a lavishly produced catalogue, the text thoroughly researched and beautifully written by Elliot Bostwick Davis (a former head of American art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). If you can’t go, the book will do nicely. But the show is worth traveling to see.

Gloucester is a storied fishing port with a rich artistic history. The charming Cape Ann Museum, best known for its wing devoted to the maritime paintings of Fitz Henry Lane, has great works by the likes of Cecilia Beaux, Ellen Day Hale, Winslow Homer, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery and the wonderful Folly Cove Designers. If you’re spending a bit of time in Gloucester, the museum has published a map marking 36 locations that were of significance to Edward and Jo on their trips to Cape Ann.

Hopper was getting crusty when he came to Gloucester in 1923. He was 41. He hadn’t sold a painting in more than 10 years. His paltry income came from selling etchings and commercial illustrations. He lived in New York’s Greenwich Village in an apartment not far from Nivison. Both had studied under Robert Henri. (Henri’s wonderful full-length portrait of Jo as a student is in the show.) Unlike Henri’s other students — George Bellows, John Sloan and Rockwell Kent — Hopper was having a hard time finding his own style.

Jo, by contrast, was thriving. She was 40, also unmarried, and enjoying great success as a watercolorist. She’d been selected for exhibitions in London and Paris. The Brooklyn Museum, known for having the best collection of watercolors in the United States, had included her work in a major exhibition.

The daughter of a piano teacher and musician, Jo taught art to immigrant children in a public school on New York’s Lower East Side, lived with her tabby cat, Arthur, and dreamed of making a living as a professional artist.

Hopper had visited Gloucester once before, in 1912 with a friend, the artist Leon Kroll. Hopper had spent time with Nivison in Ogunquit, Maine, in 1914, and then Monhegan Island two years later. But it was in Gloucester in 1923 that they became a couple.

One day, when Arthur had gone missing, Hopper approached Nivison to report on the cat’s whereabouts. Presenting her with a hand-drawn map of Gloucester, he invited her to join him on early morning painting excursions. From then on, he would signal his arrival at her boardinghouse by tossing pebbles at her window and the two would set off to paint together.

Hopper painted seaside houses and boats and telegraph poles and fences. He painted nondescript outhouses, clothes on washing lines, streets in the Italian quarter and the towers of the Portuguese church, Our Lady of Good Voyage.

Jo painted the same church, taking care to include the polychromed wooden statue of the Virgin cradling a sailing boat that stands between the two towers (the actual statue is on display in a gallery downstairs). It’s unclear what else Jo painted on those excursions because her extant works are undated.

They both worked in watercolor, a medium in which Nivison excelled. I imagine lots of side-by-side muttering, mild flirting and carefully couched offers of advice and support.

The best thing Hopper painted on that 1923 trip was “The Mansard Roof.” It shows the complicated angles of a large house on Rocky Neck with two pale yellow awnings billowing in the breeze. The house fills the frame, flanked on both sides by trees — one dark and glossy, the other lighter and airier but casting squiggly, mobile shadows onto the building’s exterior.

Like all of Hopper’s best work, the image feels plain-spoken, unfussy and all about light. But in a particularly beautiful passage in the exhibit catalogue, Bostwick Davis suggests — credibly to my mind — that it is ablaze with emotion: “The pointed dormers, interspersed with chimneys, shutters, and glimpses of the mansard roof … come together like the angled pipes of a circus calliope, blowing gusts of their happy tune as they jump up and down with joy.”

Back in New York, Jo took “The Mansard Roof” and some of Hopper’s other watercolors from Cape Ann to the Brooklyn Museum, where she argued for their inclusion in a biennial exhibition. Six of her watercolors, made before her summer romance, had already been selected. Her advocacy on Hopper’s behalf won the day.

Hopper was not known as a watercolorist. People were impressed. The critic Helen Appleton Read praised them for their “vitality and force and directness,” singling out “The Mansard Roof” for its “clear, bright, windswept atmosphere.” She failed to mention Nivison at all. The Brooklyn Museum acquired “The Mansard Roof,” and Hopper was up and running.

The following summer, Nivison wanted to go to Cape Cod. But Hopper was keen to return to Gloucester, where he’d had such luck the previous summer. After a feisty back-and-forth, Nivison agreed to give way, but only if he would marry her immediately. Hopper liked the terms. They duly married and set off once again for Gloucester.

Hopper rarely painted beaches, but that summer he and Jo both painted people seated under colorful umbrellas. Hopper favored a horizontal format, spreading his human subjects out along a line marking the intersection of sand, sea and sky. Nivison’s version of the same subject is vertical and crowded. Working in oils, she used a high-keyed, modernist palette — purples, yolky yellows and pinks — and left large parts of the foreground sketchy and unfinished.

Back in Manhattan, Jo held onto her apartment for a while, but when Arthur disappeared, she moved in with Edward. Depositing her early works in a basement, she took to painting alongside her husband in a small walk-up with a bathroom down the hall.

According to Bostwick Davis, Jo did the shopping and presented meals when they didn’t dine out locally. Her command of the domestic sphere also included — from 1933 — responsibility for running the home they built on Cape Cod with money inherited from her uncle.

At the same time, while Hopper was painting such masterpieces as “Early Sunday Morning” and “Nighthawks,” Jo managed his career, handling his correspondence and business dealings, acting as publicist, in-house curator and fastidious record-keeper. She was also, of course, his favorite model.

Meanwhile, she continued to make her own work. She eventually took to signing her works “Jo N. Hopper.” “Jo Painting,” one of the exhibit’s highlights, is the only actual portrait Hopper made of her. It shows her in profile, intently appraising an unseen canvas, one arm extended, presumably holding a brush. Her thick auburn hair, pulled back tightly, flares richly around her shoulders.

The Hoppers would return to Gloucester in 1926 and again in 1928. Over both summers, Edward fell further under the spell of its houses, and of coastal sunlight hitting their roofs and walls. The Cape Ann show boasts three sensationally good Hopper paintings from 1928. The subjects are very different: Freight cars on a railway line. A big house seen from an angle, the exterior side wall catching the sun. A patch of granite-strewn hillside in Dogtown, outside Gloucester.

What unites them is the golden Cape Ann light, and Hopper’s remarkable way of using sharp outlines, solid shadows and rich color to give his subjects a massiveness, lending brisk substance to painted illusion. He was a wonderful painter, no doubt about it.

As for Jo, whom Henri had heartbreakingly described as “a little human question mark” when he painted her as a student in 1906, it’s very hard to know what to say. There’s no need to say anything, perhaps, beyond acknowledging that she had talent and a mind of her own and that, living in a different era, she made certain very generous decisions. She mattered, in other words. She mattered deeply — and not just as Hopper’s wife and willing champion.

Poignantly, you can see Jo’s signature in an open book displayed in a glass vitrine near the museum entrance. It proves nothing momentous — only that in the summer of 1926, she walked into the Cape Ann Museum (then the Cape Ann Scientific and Literary Association) and signed the register.

Edward Hopper and Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape Through Oct. 16 at the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Mass. capeannmuseum.org.