House by the Railroad | |
---|---|
Artist | Edward Hopper |
Year | 1925 |
Catalogue | 78330 |
Medium | Oil on canvas |
Subject | 49 Conger Avenue Haverstraw, New York |
Location | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
Accession | 3.1930 |
House by the Railroad is a 1925 oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper. [1]
The house that is said to have inspired the painting is a Second Empire style Victorian mansion in Haverstraw, New York, where it still stands today. [2] The painting is reported to have influenced the Bates home in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho , [3] one of the homes in the 1956 film Giant directed by George Stevens, the home Charles Addams created for The Addams Family , [4] [5] and the house in Days of Heaven . [6]
In 1929–30, the canvas was included in Paintings by 19 Living Americans, the Museum of Modern Art’s initial show solely of American art. MoMA acquired it in 1930, one of the inaugural pieces to become part of the then new art institution's holdings. [7] The work was donated to the MoMA by the Singer sewing machine company heir, art collector, and philanthropist Stephen Clark. [8]
Charles Samuel Addams was an American cartoonist known for his darkly humorous and macabre characters. Some of his recurring characters became known as the Addams Family, and were subsequently popularized through various adaptations.
Rockland County is the second-southernmost county on the west side of the Hudson River in the U.S. state of New York, after Richmond County. It is part of the New York metropolitan area. As of the 2020 U.S. census, the county's population is 338,329, making it the state's third-most densely populated county outside New York City after Nassau and neighboring Westchester Counties. The county seat and largest hamlet is New City. Rockland County is accessible via the New York State Thruway, which crosses the Hudson River to Westchester at the Tappan Zee Bridge over the Tappan Zee, ten exits up from the NYC border, as well as the Palisades Parkway five exits up from the George Washington Bridge. The county's name derives from "rocky land", as the area has been aptly described, largely due to the Hudson River Palisades. The county is part of the Hudson Valley region of the state.
Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. He is one of America's most renowned artists and known for his skill in capturing American life and landscapes through his art.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The institution was conceived in 1929 by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Initially located in the Heckscher Building on Fifth Avenue, it opened just days after the Wall Street Crash. The museum, America's first devoted exclusively to modern art, was led by A. Conger Goodyear as president and Abby Rockefeller as treasurer, with Alfred H. Barr Jr. as its first director. Under Barr's leadership, the museum's collection rapidly expanded, beginning with an inaugural exhibition of works by European modernists. Despite financial challenges, including opposition from John D. Rockefeller Jr., the museum moved to several temporary locations in its early years, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. eventually donated the land for its permanent site.
Nyack is a village located primarily in the town of Orangetown in Rockland County, New York, United States. Incorporated in 1872, it retains a very small western section in Clarkstown. The village had a population of 7,265 as of the 2020 census. It is a suburb of New York City lying approximately 15 miles (24 km) north of the Manhattan boundary near the west bank of the Hudson River, situated north of South Nyack, east of Central Nyack, south of Upper Nyack, and southeast of Valley Cottage.
Visual art of the United States or American art is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization, there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
Haverstraw is a village incorporated in 1854 in the town of Haverstraw in Rockland County, New York, United States. It is located north of Congers, southeast of West Haverstraw, east of Garnerville, northeast of New City, and west of the Hudson River at its widest point. As of the 2020 census, the population was 12,323.
Josephine "Jo" Verstille Hopper was an American painter who studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller, and won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship. She was the wife of Edward Hopper, whom she married in 1924.
Nighthawks is a 1942 oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper that portrays four people in a downtown diner late at night as viewed through the diner's large glass window. The light coming from the diner illuminates a darkened and deserted urban streetscape.
Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their outline, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round panel or canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance painters, sometimes chose this format for madonna paintings. Alternatively, canvases may be altered by losing their flatness and assuming a three-dimensional surface. Or they can do both. That is, they can assume shapes other than rectangles, and also have surface features that are three-dimensional. Arguably, changing the surface configuration of the painting transforms it into a sculpture. But shaped canvases are generally considered paintings.
Picasso's African Period, which lasted from 1906 to 1909, was the period when Pablo Picasso painted in a style which was strongly influenced by African sculpture, particularly traditional African masks and art of ancient Egypt, in addition to non-African influences including Iberian sculpture, and the art of Paul Cézanne and El Greco. This proto-Cubist period following Picasso's Blue Period and Rose Period has also been called the Negro Period, or Black Period. Picasso collected and drew inspiration from African art during this period, but also for many years after it.
Stephen Carlton Clark was an American art collector, businessman, newspaper publisher and philanthropist. He founded the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
American Realism was a style in art, music and literature that depicted contemporary social realities and the lives and everyday activities of ordinary people. The movement began in literature in the mid-19th century, and became an important tendency in visual art in the early 20th century. Whether a cultural portrayal or a scenic view of downtown New York City, American realist works attempted to define what was real.
New York Figurative Expressionism is a visual arts movement and a branch of American Figurative Expressionism. Though the movement dates to the 1930s, it was not formally classified as "figurative expressionism" until the term arose as a counter-distinction to the New York–based postwar movement known as Abstract Expressionism.
Office at Night is a 1940 oil-on-canvas painting by the American realist painter Edward Hopper. It is owned by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which purchased it in 1948.
Girl before a Mirror(French: Jeune fille devant un miroir) is an oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in 1932. The painting is a portrait of Picasso's mistress and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who is depicted standing in front of a mirror looking at her reflection. It is housed in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Room in New York is a 1932 oil-on-canvas painting by the American artist Edward Hopper that portrays two individuals in a New York City flat. It is held in the collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art. The painting is said to have been inspired by the glimpses of lighted interiors seen by the artist near the district where he lived in Washington Square.
New York Movie is an oil on canvas painting by American painter Edward Hopper. The painting was begun in December 1938 and finished in January of 1939. Measuring 32 1/4 x 40 1/8", New York Movie depicts a nearly empty movie theater occupied with a few scattered moviegoers and a pensive usherette lost in her thoughts. Praised for its brilliant portrayal of multiple light sources, New York Movie is one of Hopper's well-regarded works. Despite the fact that the movie in the painting itself is not known, Hopper's wife and fellow painter Josephine Hopper wrote in her notes on New York Movie that the image represents fragments of snow-covered mountains.
Eighth, it may interest art lovers to know that the old house in 'Psycho' was inspired solely by Edward Hopper's painting of the house by the railroad.