Artists | senseofplace

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was born in Nyack, New York, on the Hudson River. He began his career as a commercial artist and illustrator. Beginning in 1930, Hopper and his wife Jo divided their time between New York City and their house in Truro on Cape Cod. Some of Hopper's best-known paintings, like Highland Light (right), were done in Truro. He painted more than a hundred oils and water-colors of Cape subjects, many of them landscapes.

Cape Cod in the Arts: Artists

If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.

--Edward Hopper

The genre of landscape painting emerged during the Renaissance with the discovery of the science of optics, and combines a focus on a portion of land seen at any one time, and the artist’s vision—how it is seen. “In most definitions of landscape,” Tim Cresswell states, “the viewer is outside of it. This is the primary way in which it [landscape] differs from place. Places are very much things to be inside of.”

Two images from a series called "Beside the Sea," executed by Motherwell in the 1960s.

Artists of all levels and styles continue to come to Cape Cod to enjoy the beautiful light and to capture something of the essence of the Cape's spirit in their work.

Edward Hopper. Highland Light. 1930.

Although not strictly a landscape because it contains figures, Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening, (above) exemplifies the feeling of looking at a place, the viewer viewing the scene but not part of it. The painting shows a couple and their dog outside their Cape home on a summer evening. The viewer is observing from a vantage point a short distance away and very slightly above. The house is a composite of typical Victorian-era Cape houses, the doorway based on a house in Orleans, the figures not representing actual people but on types. The figures seem self-absorbed. The woman and man do not interact, and are oblivious of the observer. Even the dog focuses on something outside of the scene, ignoring the man’s entreaty. Hopper has captured the color of the late summer grass, the fading Cape light portraying an eerie, somewhat ominous mood, a feeling echoed by the menacing trees.

The Provincetown Art Colony

Hopper was not, of course, the only artist who painted on the Cape. Artists had been drawn to Provincetown since the late 1890s, forming the Provincetown Art Association in 1914. Artists who had been working in France fled Europe for Provincetown when the World War broke out. From the 1940s to the 50s, Provincetown was a summer haven for abstract painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell and others. By its nature abstract art may be less related to sense of place. However, Robert Motherwell spoke of how the Cape influenced his work. "All summer I see blue and white and sand color more than anything. So I begin to use those colors a lot. It’s like osmosis; the colors fill me. I become obsessed with them. . . "

Edward Hopper. Cape Cod Evening. 1939.