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Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York in 1882. He began drawing as a child, and in his youth drew various self-portraits in pencil or ink, giving an insight into a clearly introspective personality. He began training as an illustrator at the Correspondence School of Illustrating in New York City, and the following year he undertook more training of this kind at the New York School of Art, founded by the artist William Merritt Chase.
Hopper worked commercially for twenty years using various media, including charcoal, pencil, crayon, pen and ink, and watercolour, creating posters, advertisements, and illustrations. His work was not the most popular during this time, and he was not recognised critically until the mid-1920’s.
Hopper's career spanned a period of almost sixty years. His vision of realism, using moody light and buildings, created a world of human isolation, as in such famous paintings as Early Sunday Morning (1930) and Night Hawks (1942). "No artist has painted a more revealing portrait of twentieth-century America," writes Lloyd Goodrich. "But he was not merely an objective realist. His art was charged with strong personal emotion, with a deep attachment to our familiar everyday world, in all its ugliness, banality, and beauty."
