Edward Hopper's First Paintings Were Copies. Why That Makes Them More Interesting

Few painters feel as singular as Edward Hopper. The late-night diner, the empty Sunday street, the woman alone in a hotel room with sunlight on the wall: you know a Hopper the moment you see one. So it is a small jolt to learn that the first oil paintings he ever made weren’t his own compositions at all.

In an extract from his new biography, Edward Hopper: A Life, published in The Art Newspaper on 20 October, the art historian Louis Shadwick shows that all six of the oils Hopper painted before art school were copies of other artists’ pictures. The book is published in the UK by Yale University Press on 24 November, and it says a lot about how artists are made.

The attic, the reverend and the misleading titles

Hopper grew up in Nyack, a small town on the Hudson River north of New York. At around 13 he turned the attic of the family home into a makeshift studio, and there, in the mid-1890s, he began painting in oils. The results stayed in that attic, unseen, for decades.

In the late 1960s, shortly after Hopper’s death, a local clergyman, the Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn, found them along with a trove of early drawings and watercolours. Sanborn gave the paintings titles, and those titles shaped how everyone saw them afterwards. A snowy scene at sunset became Old Ice Pond at Nyack. A quiet seascape became Rowboat on Hudson, later Rowboat in Rocky Cove. Writers read the pictures as a teenager’s view of his home town and an early sign of his feel for light.

Shadwick’s research shows that neither picture has anything to do with Nyack. Old Ice Pond is a faithful copy of A Winter Sunset by Bruce Crane, a popular American landscape painter of the day. Rowboat in Rocky Cove, dated 1895 and long thought to be Hopper’s first oil, copies a watercolour called Lake View by an unknown artist. The others follow suit: Country Road copies John Francis Murphy, Ships copies Edward Moran, and Church and Landscape copies a stock scene that also appears on a Victorian porcelain plaque. A sixth, previously uncatalogued clipper-ship picture copies an 1893 newspaper lithograph, so it may even predate the rowboat.

A magazine that taught a nation to paint

Most of the originals came from a single source: the Art Interchange, a widely read American magazine for amateur artists. It printed collectable colour plates with detailed instructions for copying them. The Lake View plate was described as “a very simple subject and well adapted to beginners”. Shadwick thinks Hopper’s mother probably collected the plates for her children, and the issue dates suggest the family may have subscribed from as early as 1886.

Hopper signed most of these paintings “E.H.” or “E. Hopper” without acknowledging the sources, but Shadwick reads the signatures as a boy’s pride in private achievements, not deceit. He also suggests Hopper may not have painted a single original oil until he enrolled at the New York School of Art in autumn 1900.

Why this isn’t a scandal

It would be easy to frame this as a debunking, but the more useful reading is the opposite. Copying is how painters have always learned. The National Gallery in London still runs a scheme for copyists, and on a weekday morning you may find one at an easel in front of a Turner. What Shadwick has found isn’t a forger. It’s a teenager teaching himself the craft with what was to hand, which in 1890s small-town America meant a magazine.

The discovery does challenge a long-cherished myth: that Hopper’s talent appeared in adolescence more or less unaided, and that he had little contact with American art movements before art school. The copies show a boy studying contemporary painting closely, and in particular American tonalism, a soft, atmospheric landscape style that dominated around 1900 and is now largely forgotten. Shadwick first identified some of these sources about six years ago as a doctoral student at the Courtauld Institute in London. The biography completes the picture.

What gallery-goers and collectors can take from it

There is a practical lesson here for anyone who buys or looks at art. Titles, dates and backstories are often added by later owners, dealers or cataloguers, and once attached they shape how a work is seen for decades. “Nyack” was never Hopper’s word; it was Sanborn’s. When you’re considering a work at auction or in a gallery, it’s worth asking who named it, who dated it and on what evidence. A good dealer will be glad you asked.

There’s also a gentler lesson. Early work matters for what it tells us about how an artist developed, not because it shows a genius fully formed. Those six small paintings are more interesting now than they were last week: they show the young Hopper with a magazine open beside him, learning to look. Many of the emerging painters in independent galleries across the country are still in that apprenticeship, working out what they’ve absorbed and what is their own. Watching that happen is one of the real pleasures of following artists early.

Next time you’re in front of a Hopper, look at the light and remember that it was learned.