13 Works, Today, March 18th. is artist Josephine Hopper's day, her story, illustrated with footnotes #076

Jo Nivison

Untitled (landscape)

Oil on Canvas

36" x 29"

PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM

Josephine Verstille Hopper (née Nivison; March 18, 1883 – March 6, 1968) 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.

Robert Henri (1906)

The Art Student, c. 1906

Portrait of Miss Josephine Nivision, later known as Jo Hopper

I have no further description, at this time

In 1900, Jo enrolled in the Normal College of the City of New York, a free teacher-training school for young women. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1904 and decided to study art and eventually try to become an artist—already at college she started drawing and performing in productions of the drama club there. In late 1905 at the New York School of Art she met Robert Henri, who soon asked her to pose for a portrait (The Art Student, 1906) (See above). 

Josephine Nivison Hopper

Self Portrait

Watercolor

28 1/4 × 22 1/4 in, 71.8 × 56.5 cm

Edward Hopper House

Josephine Verstille (Nivison) Hopper

Untitled (Self-portrait)

I have no further description, at this time

In February 1906, Nivison began her career as public school teacher. During the next decade she earned her living by teaching, but never abandoned art and remained in touch with Henri and many other artists; in 1907 she travelled to Europe with Henri and some of his students. By 1915, she joined the Washington Square Players as an actress and performed in their productions. During the summers she frequented various New England art colonies.

Josephine Nivison Hopper

Obituary

Oil on canvas

24 1/8 × 19 15/16in. (61.3 × 50.6 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art

By 1918, she was seeking a change of scene and a new job. She unsuccessfully applied for a job with the Red Cross, seeking to go abroad again. World War I had not yet ended, and she signed up to do hospital work overseas. Taking a leave of absence from the New York City public schools, Jo left in late 1918 only to return in January 1919, ill with bronchitis. She was discharged by the Surgeon General in June, and discovered that she had lost her teaching position. Penniless and homeless, she found temporary shelter thanks to an old sexton at the Church of the Ascension who had helped her after seeing her weeping in the church. It was not until a year later that she won the right for another job from the Board of Education; after that, she continued teaching and pursuing a career in art.

Jo Hopper

Landscape by Noelle

Watercolour

I have no further description, at this time

She first met her future husband Edward Hopper in art school, and then again in 1914 in Ogunquit, where they were staying in the same boarding house. However, their friendship apparently only began some years later. Their relationship became much closer during the summer of 1923, when they were both living in an art colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts. After a courtship that lasted for about a year, the couple married on July 9, 1924. They remained together until Edward Hopper died in 1967. 

Edward Hopper

Jo Painting, 1936

Oil on canvas

Whitney Museum of American Art

Edward Hopper  (1882–1967) 

Nighthawks, 21 January 1942

Oil on canvas

Height: 84.1 cm (33.1 in); Width: 152.4 cm (60 in)

Art Institute of Chicago

Jo Hopper appeared as a customer in her husband’s famous painting Nighthawks.

Edward Hopper

A Woman in the Sun, c. 1961

Oil on linen

40 1/8 × 60 3/16in. (101.9 × 152.9 cm)

Whitney Museum of American Art

Josephine Nivison Hopper was 78 when she posed for this painting. Rather than adhere to realistic detail, her husband Edward Hopper chose to paint her according to his internal vision, there by turning back the clock to her youth. Whitney Museum New York

Edward would wake her up at dawn to stand, undressed, in the middle of their cold apartment, so that he realizes his masterpiece , 'A Woman in the Sun', "relates the New York Post .

Jo modeled for the figures in most of her husband's paintings after 1924. Edward Hopper only produced one oil painting of his wife (Jo Painting (1936) (See above), but frequently made watercolors, drawings and caricatures of her. Throughout her married life Jo kept extensive diaries that recount her life with Edward and his creative process. 

Josephine Nivison Hopper

Bertram Hartman, c. 1950s

Watercolor and graphite pencil on paper

20 1/2 × 14in. (52.1 × 35.6 cm)

Whitney Museum of American

C. Bertram Hartman (1882–1960) was an American oil and watercolor painter. His paintings are exhibited in museums in the United States.

Hartman was born in Junction City, Kansas in 1882. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He also studied art in Paris. More on Bertram Hartman

As Edward Hopper's career soared soon after the marriage and his reputation continued to grow, Jo's artistic career waned after the 1920s. This was in part because "Jo poured her considerable energies into tending and nurturing her husband's work, handling loan requests and needling him into painting." She participated in a few group exhibitions, and she won the Huntington Hartford Foundation fellowship in 1957.

Jo Nivison
Railroad gates, c. 1928

Watercolour

I have no further description, at this time

After her husband died in 1967, Jo bequeathed her entire artistic estate (and that of her husband) to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

For a long time it was thought that the museum had discarded most of her work. In 2000, the writer Elizabeth Thompson Colleary discovered about 200 Jo Hoppers in the Whitney's basement.

Jo Nivison

Untitled (landscape)

Oil on Canvas

36" x 29"

PROVINCETOWN ART ASSOCIATION AND MUSEUM

Additional works by Josephine Nivison Hopper have continued to surface. Jo's watercolors were exhibited at the Edward Hopper House Art Center, Nyack, NY, in 2014 and a few examples were included in an exhibition of "Edward Hopper as Illustrator" at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, also in 2014. In 2016, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA, announced that 69 drawings and watercolors by Jo Hopper were included in the gift of Laurence C. and J. Anton Schiffenhaus, along with 96 drawings by Edward Hopper. An exhibition of these works, "Edward and Josephine Hopper from the Permanent Collection: drawings, diaries, letters, watercolors," opened in August 2017. The exhibition was extended "due to the overwhelming interest by scholars, critics and visitors" and remained on display until August 2018.

Hopper, Josephine

Untitled (portrait of woman with brown hair)

I have no further description, at this time

As Edward Hopper's wife and companion for more than 40 years, Jo influenced his work in numerous ways. Perhaps most importantly, it was her example that inspired Edward to seriously take up watercolor, during the summer of 1923.

A number of Jo's works depict motifs that would later become important for her husband. The watercolor Shacks, done in 1923, depicts two houses behind a dead tree, a subject similar to many of Hopper's later works. Jo's watercolor Movie Theater—Gloucester (c. 1926–27) foreshadowed Edward's interest in depicting movie theaters: he produced a drypoint of the subject in 1928, and then returned to it occasionally, most famously in the oil painting New York Movie (1939).

Edward Hopper

Eleven A.M., c. 1926

Oil on canvas

Joseph H. Hirshhorn museum?

It is clear that the woman is seated in a living room of an apartment from the furniture and she appears to be waiting for someone. The colours of the painting are rather muted and help to give it a rather moody feel.

In this 1906 portrait of Josephine Nivison, painted while she was a twenty-two-year-old student at the New York School of Art, her artist’s smock slips from her shoulder like the falling strap of Madame X’s gown. Along with aspects of Jo’s character he can’t help but capture: her steady gaze of steely resolve, the way she holds her brushes like a divining rod. More on this painting

Beginning in the mid-1920s Jo became her husband's only model. It was she who thought up the names for a number of her husband's paintings, including one of his most famous oil paintings, Nighthawks. Despite their complicated relationship, she helped when her husband felt insecure about a painting in progress, as in, for example, the case of Five A.M. (1937). As late as 1936, Jo reported that her husband was highly competitive and that her starting a work would frequently inspire Edward to start his own. 

In addition to her roles as Edward's muse and model, Jo served as the artists' record-keeper. In ledger books, now in the archives of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jo maintained inventories of the Hoppers' works, Edward's and her own.   More on Josephine Hopper

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