Edward Hopper, the father of American realism, was born on July 22, 1882 in Nyack, New Jersey. He belonged to an educated and bourgeois family, that sent him to study at the New York School of Art in 1900. In the beginning was impressionist due to travel through Europe in the early twentieth century. But he left everything to return to the United States, and the European Style was lost when he returned.
The fame came in the '20s, when he began to paint scenes of strong American realism, a synthesis of figurative vision of poetic sentiment attached to Hopper.
His work is full of urban or rural images, immersed in silence, without a particular theme. The compositions are geometric with cold light and sharp elements. and there isn't any intention of communication, accentuating the loneliness.
In his canvases managed to capture the sensitivity that characterized the United States at that time: loneliness, isolation and melancholy. To all these basic features of his work, we must add that the colors used were flat, and introduced architectural elements to get into their scenes (strong vertical lines, horizontal and diagonal).
Hopper scenes are silhouetted against the light, there are big and clunky furniture, forested landscapes or nudes. All are absorbed in an act without importance but surrounded by great mystery, like isolated frames.
On one hand we have the interiors of the rooms, that seem safe and solid, but also a view from the outside of those rooms. They are the views of someone who casts a menacing and lurking shadow.
Another element is the large windows that we can see in Hitchcock's films, who always watched America as a wild and exotic. And the most of the time these windows appear too in the novels of Nabokov.
And the scenes are interrupted at some point, and leave us in suspense because we will never know the end of the story, and no one will reveal the secrets of those anonymous characters from the American heartland.
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