The Cape Ann Museum (Gloucester, Massachusetts) is presenting “Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating an American Landscape,” an exhibition organized by guest curator Elliot Bostwick Davis to highlight, for the first time, this artist’s formative relationship with Gloucester and Cape Ann. The exhibition is on view through October 16, 2023.
Though he had painted five oils there in 1912, Hopper (1882–1967) had reached a career impasse by 1923, when he was 41 and supporting himself not as a fine artist, but as an illustrator and etcher.
Returning to Gloucester that summer — exactly a century ago — he met his future wife, Jo Nivison (1883–1968), who was more successful as an artist.
The exhibition recasts her not just as his muse, but as the driving force behind his creation of the distinctive style we admire today.
The couple revisited Gloucester until 1928, and it was there that Edward produced the watercolors that earned his first acclaim.
On view are 66 paintings, drawings, and prints borrowed from the Whitney Museum of American Art and 27 other lenders. Fifty-eight are by Edward, seven by Jo, and one by their teacher Robert Henri.