Edward Hopper (American 1882-1967) is one of the most revered American artists of the 20th century. He captures stillness, solitude, and often loneliness in the midst of bright colors and realistic interpretations. Edward Hopper is noir, in red and blue.

Hopper was born in 1882 in the Hudson River Valley region of New York. Though he appreciated Europe, and stayed there multiple times, he felt that it didn't have an undue influence on him artistically. He studied in Paris, as was fashionable, but was more affected by the works of Rembrandt than cubism.

Hopper's work look like snapshots taken by a lonely, world-wide traveling salesman: train stations, diners, gas stations, sides of the road. Lonely looking 19th century houses with curtains flapping in a breeze, stand abandoned in the middle of nowhere. His urban scenes, too, like theatres, music halls and city streets, convey the same sense of solitude and separatism. Theatre-goers stand collecting their belongings in an already empty theatre. Actors isolated on stage. City streets brightly lit, but empty in the middle of the night. Edward Hopper was one of the first to convey that sense of being alone in a crowd, surrounded by ear-shattering silence.

Technically, Edward Hopper is considered a realist, despite the fact that much of his work has symbolic elements. He concentrated on simple composition with complex emotional results. His work is both modern in its bleakness and simplicity, and simultaneously seems nostalgic for values of an earlier period.

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