EDWARD HOPPER 1882-1967
Pennsylvania Coal Town, 1947
Oil on canvas, 28 X 40" (71.12 x 10 1.60 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 948-0-115

Shoeshine Cliffs, Wy. (Fig. 1) is one of three watercolors that Edward Hopper painted during an automobile trip to the West Coast in 1941. He and his wife, the painter Josephine Nivison Hopper, spent eight nights in Shoshone Valley, Wyoming. There, on July 9, Hopper began this picture at the base of the Holy City rock formations. The dramatic red sandstone rocks prompted him to work outdoors, near the river at the bottom of the escarpment, rather than to paint in his parked car as was his Custom. His progress on what was an atypical subject for him was disturbed by rainy weather. Three days passed before he could return to the site. Finally, on July 15, Hopper was able to finish his watercolor and he and his wife headed back to the East Coast. In addition to this drive to the West Coast in 1941, Hopper had traveled in the Midwest as an exhibition juror. Such trips prompted him to turn from his usual locations in New York City and New England to focus on the look of other regions. Fiction set in regional America also aroused his imagination. When an interviewer asked what he thought of the work of Theodore Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson, he had replied, "They're a little too Midwestern for me." On another occasion, although he called Sinclair Lewis "a fathead," he admitted that Dreiser was "all right," and he expressed unusual enthusiasm for Anderson, pronouncing him "a good writer."
Hopper's fascination with the abstract shapes of Shoshone Cliffs, Wy. recalls the many oil paintings of Monhegan Island's rocky shore that he had produced in Maine during the late 1910s. He had not then found his mature style and he did not choose to show these panels in later years. Yet in both this watercolor and in these earlier Monhegan scenes, the dramatic contrasts of light and shadow on the rugged natural shapes must have been what appealed to him.
While his watercolors were always painted on location, Hopper's mature oils were often imagined scenes based on various places. Hopper finished his canvas Pennsylvania Coal Town in his New York studio on April 23, 1947. This picture depicts the figure of a bald man raking leaves by the side of a nondescript house. The scene is the closest Hopper ever came to expressing sympathy with the masses. It brings to mind Hopper's student sketch after Jean Francois Millet's Man with a Hoe (1863, Musse du Louvre). In her husband's record book, Josephine Hopper noted that the grey steps were dark and that the terrace was sooty; she identified the glum, lonely figure of a man with red hair as a Pole, picking an immigrant ethnic working-class group of that region.
Pennsylvania Coal Town brings to mind Sherwood Anderson's 1917 novel Marching Men, set in the Pennsylvania coal region in a town called Coal Creek. The novel, which Anderson dedicated "To American Workingmen," comments on the oppressive
routine of workers' lives. Anderson described the town as "hideous ... a necessity of modern life." Hopper's painting of the man with the rake recalls Anderson's description: 'An Italian who lived in a house on a hillside cultivated a garden. His place was the one beauty spot in the valley... When a strike came on he was told by the mine manager to go on back to work or move out of his house. He thought of the garden and of the work he had done and went back to his routine of work in the mine. While he worked the miners marched up the hill and destroyed the garden. The next day the Italian also joined the striking miners." In fact, Hopper suggests the "Italian' ethnicity of the man with the rake by including an unexpectedly elegant object at the front of the otherwise dreary house: a classical terra cotta urn on a stand, an Italianate garden ornament illuminated by the same sunlight that shines on the man's bald head. Although Josephine Hopper referred to the figure in Hopper's painting as a Pole, instead of an Italian, the novel also discusses Polish immigrants:

"In little Polish villages the word has been whispered about, 'In America one gets much money...
Hopper shared certain expressive qualities with Anderson. Both knew how to be suggestive rather than literal. By refusing to be explicit, both the writer and painter were able to call upon the imaginative powers of the audience. Both were selective and indefinite, rather than inclusive, precise, and demonstrative. Before becoming established, Anderson had written advertising copy and Hopper had been forced to earn his living as a commercial illustrator. Hopper subsequently rejected illustration and did not want to paint anecdotal pictures. Instead he chose to express a mood or feeling. He described his aim rather well when he responded to a question about "what he was after" in a later painting, Sun in an Empty Room (1963, private collection): "I'm after ME."

GAIL LEVIN