Walking in Edward Hopper’s Footsteps

His family home in Nyack, N.Y., a house museum and study center, delivers new ways to see his moody, cryptic art.

‘G ive me the child until he’s seven and I’ll show you the man” is sometimes attributed to Aristotle, though it’s usually considered a Jesuit maxim today. It does sound Jesuitical, doesn’t it? What about the child — and man — from birth to age 28? That would mean Edward Hopper (1892–1967) and Nyack, his hometown on the Hudson River 20 miles north of Inwood in Manhattan. There, Hopper was born in the part–Greek Revival, part–Queen Anne house, nothing fancy, on 82 North Broadway, one of Nyack’s main drags. Today it’s the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center. Most people call it Hopper House. I had a good visit there last week.

As a young man, Hopper made two long and decisive trips to Paris, but the house his grandfather built in 1858, where his parents lived and died, and where he grew up, was home until he got an apartment in 1910 at 3 Washington Square in Manhattan, where he died in 1967. Hopper owned the family house until his death, having inherited it from his unmarried sister, who lived there until she died, in 1965.

I remember when Hopper died. It was headline news. Everyone sensate knew who he was, since his art from the mid-1920s into the ’50s clicked because his scenes were so familiar — diner interiors at night, a row of storefronts in low brick buildings, and people who seem alone even when with others. His 1920s pictures never roared, his flappers never flapped. This tall, bald, homely, quiet artist — he looked grumpy — was film noir’s uncle. We couldn’t imagine him as a dad. He was very modern but no libertine. That he seemed Victorian as well tells us how hard it is to shake the past, even the distant past.

Hopper House is a familiar old place, white clapboard, with wisteria growing by the front porch, It looks like Everyhouse in Anytown from postwar America, post–Civil War, that is. There’s nothing swank about it, but it’s comfortable. Nyack’s population is 7,000 now; it was between 4,000 and 5,000 in Hopper’s day, and it hasn’t changed much, visually at least. Shops, offices, real life — nothing touristical. Old-fashioned soda fountains, diners, and barber shops are either still there or not long gone.

The first thing I see in most American vernacular architecture is geometry — lots of rectangles, triangles, squares, and horizontals and verticals. Where’s the serpentine line, the flourish, the gingerbread, the gilding? It’s here and there, in doses rather than dollops. Nyack edges into exurban, so such figures, in excess, wouldn’t do. Hopper’s house, inside and out, is packed with simple geometry. So is Nyack. Hopper’s work owes as much to the look of Nyack as it does to Manhattan’s.

The look is straightforward, not gushy or beguiling. Each element stands in isolation, as does the whole house. It’s rigid and spartan, though leavened by wisteria and shrubs, and each architectural element is an individual atom. Tocqueville warned about American individualism, what he called isolated “atoms,” unlinked to ancestry or heritage or a system of expectations and protectors. What happens? When we think of this, Hopper’s architecture at home and in his art, his work seems more palpable, not crystal-clear, but we get his drift.

After the deaths of Hopper, his wife, and his sister, the house was neglected — squatters lived there for a bit — and mostly emptied, but Nyack locals got activated before the wrecking ball arrived. The website has a wonderful few pages of blow-by-blow restoration steps, among them a course at Rockland Community College called Caring for an Old House that, by design, enlisted students to paint Hopper House. I love this salute to volunteerism.

A new nonprofit — the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center — was born, and it’s now observing its 55th anniversary. The house first served artists generally but now focuses mostly on Hopper. It owns about a thousand artifacts and memorabilia from Hopper’s family and from his life there. Among them are early drawings, artist tools, notebooks, and letters. Each room has a wall panel tracing the history of the house, Hopper’s childhood, and his parents. Hopper’s art might sometimes strike us as creepy, but his childhood was as warm and fuzzy as a Victorian Baptist milieu would allow.

Hopper House does exhibitions in its first-floor galleries, once the Hopper parlor. A wonderful one now on view is James Prosek: Memory, Trees, and Shadows. Prosek (b. 1975) is one of the many artists I’ve followed from the beginning of his career. Now past 50, he’s in mid-career and, like every good artist, evolving and experimenting. The exhibition mixes his work with work by Hopper’s wife, Josephine Hopper (1883–1968), called Jo. I smiled when I heard she called him “Eddie.” I never thought of the dour, often spitty artist as an “Eddie,” but he had to be called something. Jo was a teacher, a casual student of Robert Henri’s, and a decent artist whose career was mostly being Eddie’s wife and tagalong. Jo was usually his model, too.

It’s a smart and poignant exhibition that fits the house. One theme, and a various one, is shadow, a subject that pushes an artist since it’s there, a visual element, a presence often packed with drama large and small, but it’s also not there. Its anchor in the show is a bronze tree stump out which flows a cut steel shadow of a leafless tree, spanning the floor. Hopper’s house is also shadow, or a vestige, a keeper of memory. Hopper took baby steps on those old, wide-planked, soft, nicked pine floors, made of local wood. We think of him when we hear them creak.

Shadows in Hopper’s work, and in Prosek’s and Jo’s as well, become characters and storytellers. They’re a kind of drawing, a three-dimensional form translated into a two-dimensional surface. Steel is modern stuff and what we use for skyscrapers and spaceships. Tensile, durable, tough, used for in-your-face things that cast shadows, it’s one of the biggest boons that allows the life we enjoy today. It’s nonetheless made from iron and carbon, basics in nature. And even steel goes the way of all flesh.

Prosek’s Remnant, a 2026 painting of a shadow on a red barn, is about as enigmatic and intense a work of art as I’ve seen in a long time. Red barns with shingle roofs set against a sky mixed with blue and puffy clouds are a New England staple, but they’re a Midwest one as well. In Remnant, a tree’s shadow stretches over the width and length of the barn — weightless, hegemonic, and unintentional art. Shadows are transient and ephemeral but also put in humanity’s service from early days. Shadows are, after all, our first clocks.

Trees are ubiquitous in America, but when we see them in art, we realize how weird they look. They’re big and assertive without doing anything. It’s easy to humanize them but only to an extent, since we chop them down and use them to house us, furnish us, and to supply fire and heat. Prosek especially invests them with authority, otherworldly or primordial. Eddie does, too, and Jo as well. Formidable yet transient, trees, like everything else that’s organic, never really go away. Wood, leaves, and roots rot. Goods made of wood disintegrate. Then they have an afterlife. We mere mortals do, too, even if, for those nonbelievers, it’s only in memories. Nothing lasts forever, even steel, and nothing ever goes away.

Prosek does something very clever, in a good way. He’s a painter but also a sculptor, a naturalist, a documentary maker, and a writer. He made a wooden pencil sculpture, not a straight pencil but one bent into a circle. The pencil’s point and eraser tip come a fraction of an inch from touching each other. It’s a subversion, done by steaming wood until it’s pliable and then bending it. Life is a circle from birth to death, decay, and the advent of new life.

Why a pencil? I learned that Henry David Thoreau’s family fortune came from pencils. That’s the manufacture of pencils using New Hampshire graphite that his father discovered and mined, arguably the world’s best graphite, at least for pencils. The tip and the body allow us to write, to convey information about our world, to record, to use words to make sense of the world, and to communicate our thoughts and information to others. Here, the circle, a sign for enclosure as well as the cycle of life, isn’t closed.

It can’t ever be closed.

We try to know, but some things aren’t knowable. Memory helps. Records give information a longer lifespan. Writing and reading teach. Still, continuation and erasure don’t fight or compete, but they vie, and erasure has the upper hand. Hopper’s art presents us with the unknowable, the inscrutable, and presences we can’t see. Hopper House hangs Prosek’s pencil over the fireplace, where in olden days an ancestor portrait might have been displayed. The artist is referencing heritage and legacy from the deep, dark past.

Prosek is a wonderful artist and a profound, original thinker. So many artists are one-trick ponies or shock jocks. His work lasts. Hopper House’s Prosek show is “conceived as a primer,” the website tells us, to a bigger Prosek exhibition at the Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum in 2027. The collaboration is a coup for a small house museum. The Edward Hopper Landmark Preservation Foundation, which owns the house and runs the museum, started its work in 1971 first as a renovation project and then as an art space and a space for artist studios. In the list of exhibitions over the last ten years, not all are Hopper shows. I heard that its look at Ellsworth Kelly’s Hudson River pictures was very good. Nyack is an artsy place, and exhibitions of work by locals are welcomed.

Hopper isn’t known as a seascapist, but he summered first on Monhegan, the bewitched island off Maine’s coast, and then in South Truro near the end of Cape Cod, painting lots of scenes there and in Gloucester, Mass. Nyack is on the waterfront, too. It’s a Hudson River hub on the banks of the broad expanse known as the Tappan Zee, which is about three miles across at its widest — “zee” is Dutch for “sea.” Hopper’s bedroom at the house on North Broadway has a view of the river. Vast stretches of water, unless they’re upset, are serene and silent but also cryptic. Rooms by the Sea, from 1951, at Yale, is a mystery scene. It’s a partly empty room, an open door, a trapezoidal block of light on the bare wall, and, just below the open door, the blue sea. Hopper described it as “the stepping-off point.”

Annie Leibovitz, working for Vogue, did a two-day photo shoot at Hopper House in 2023 using models dressed as Hopper’s subjects, posed in the house and outside of it. Cindy Sherman was one of the players, dressed as Hopper’s clown in 1914’s Soir Bleu.  The 25-year-old actress Maya Hawke, the daughter of Uma Therman and Ethan Hawke, posed in a slinky cobalt gown in the back of Hopper House. The back of the house is flat. Only the 1882 addition juts out, but that’s a mass and not an architectural element. Windows are flat. So, there’s a lot of geometry and austerity, to a Puritan degree. Hopper descended from Dutch Calvinists and was a dour Baptist himself.

Hawke and the house are a case of opposites attract. They’re so disparate that we can’t stop watching. Light coming from the east over the Hudson pushes the mood, leaving the scene backlit. It’s early-morning light, not a block of light so bright and obvious that it becomes an active player, but a ghostly light. Hopper’s light, whether muted or bright, and his shadows are part of his heroic restraint. He endows light with eloquence.

Helen Hayes and her husband, Charles MacArthur — who wrote the Broadway hit The Front Page and lots of Hollywood screenplays, and who had a long fling with Dorothy Parker — also lived in Nyack. Hayes, of course, was the great stage actress of her day. Hopper’s Pretty Penny, from 1939, is a portrait of Hayes’s and MacArthur’s Italianate pile of a house, also on North Broadway. I love this painting, owned by the Smith College Museum of Art.

Pretty Penny, the house, was built in 1872 and is as high Victorian as American houses go. Architecture with a mind of its own, it’s got attitude.

Pretty Penny is Hopper’s only commission. MacArthur hired him mostly because Hopper had lived in Nyack and often visited his sister down the road, not because he liked Hopper’s oddball architecture, mostly New York brownstones, factory buildings, modest storefronts, and plain farmhouses. Hopper’s career in the late 1930s was in a drought, and, at $2,500, the job paid well. He didn’t enjoy the experience — for-hire work rankled him since he’d always painted only what he wanted — and he thought the house was too fussy, too hard to simplify. According to Hayes, he complained about the house, saying, “It does nothing for me. . . . There is no light and no air that I can find for the house.”

I like the way Pretty Penny juts and struts in the portrait. MacArthur wanted Hopper to add his daughter and the family poodle to the scene. Hopper refused. Still, Hayes and MacArthur loved what they got. It’s not the house’s fault that the heinous Rosie O’Donnell owned it for a time in the 1990s. O’Donnell built a high wall in front of the house so we can’t see it from the street. The new owners are very nice.