Edward Hopper: The Watercolors by Virginia M. Mecklenburg. 1999. Softcover. (LF)

The first major work on the exquisite watercolors of America's foremost and most popular realist painter. Edward Hopper has been celebrated for over half a century as America's most eloquent realist artist. His best known oils, such as Nighthawks , Early Sunday Morning , and House by a Railroad , are powerful psychological statements that convey a sense of angst and alienation.

Yet there is another Hopper we know less well: the freer, more spontaneous spirit that emerges in his watercolors. In 1923 he spent a summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and began painting houses, landscapes, and fishing boats. In them he captures remnants of nineteenth-century America that for him symbolized the fundamental character of the country's people and places, and prompted him to reexamine his views about the relationship between the past and the modern. Over the next two decades, Hopper painted hundreds of watercolors, in Gloucester, the coast of Maine, New Mexico, and Cape Cod.

This beautiful book reproduces and examines over one hundred of Hopper's greatest watercolors in the context of his life and travels. It is an indispensable book for anyone interested in American art. 101 four-color and 40 black-and-white illustrations. 101 four-color and 40 black-and-white illustrations