My Dear Mr Hopper

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Letters to Edward Hopper from a female friend both tantalize and reveal

My Dear Mr Hopper by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary

The dust jacket of this slender volume features a yellowing letter and its envelope addressed to Mr Edward Hopper at 48 Rue de Lille in Paris.  The letter begins with the regrets of the writer (Miss Alta Hilsdale) at not being able to see Hopper on the Friday (he is superseded by a talk on William Morris) or the Saturday (no reason given).

The cover of this book presents a tease for what one might hope to be a deep insight into a hitherto unresearched part of Hopper’s emotional life.  Although this depth rarely materializes, very interesting insights into some key paintings do.

The editing and commentary on this cache of letters is by Elizabeth Thompson Colleary and the documents are presented in their entirety, along with reproductions of some holographs that are sometimes valuable in assessing the emotional state of the writer.

The principal reason for the dearth of emotional insights is the lack of any record of Hopper’s responses to these letters from Hilsdale. This gap is compounded by Hilsdale’s self-absorption: there is rarely any allusion to the contents of Hopper’s letters.  What emerges is a long series (the letters date from June 1904 to October 1914) of excuses for not meeting that starts to sound like a contemporary version of ‘I’m washing my hair’.

Hopper’s marriage to Jo Nivison in 1924 was preceded by an affair with an older French woman, Jeanne Cheruy, which started around 1914, soon after Hilsdale’s penultimate letter of October 1914, in which she suddenly announces her forthcoming marriage to a Mr Bleecker. Interestingly, the early correspondence overlaps with a romantic liaison with an English woman, Enid Saies, in Paris during 1906–7.

The strongest evidence for what he describes as Hopper’s ‘romance with Alta’ comes from the Reverend Arthayer Sanborn, the discoverer of the letters among Hopper’s effects, and a close friend of Jo and Edward.  The testimony in the letters themselves to Hopper’s feelings may be the number of rebuffs imparted and therefore the implied persistence of Hopper’s campaign.

The letters were sent from Minnesota and from various addresses in Paris and New York to addresses for Hopper in Paris and New York. The peripatetic nature of Hilsdale's life is explained by her desire to escape from the farm that her father, a wealthy banker, had bought in Minnesota and his intentions of preparing Alta for a suitable marriage by sending her for education and cultural enrichment to Paris and New York.

For his part, Hopper visited Paris three times, seeing it as the Mecca that allowed him to acquaint himself with the old masters.  The majority of the letters emerge from these periods in 1906–7, 1909 and 1910.

Colleary quotes an undated note written in what appears to be a distressed handwriting: ‘you are the type of man who does not believe a girl can be platonic indefinitely. It seems that you are in a class who regards every girl as one with designs to besiege your affections’. Colleary then combines this with a view of Hopper’s actions with regard to Enid Saies to conclude that he may have waited until Hilsdale’s marriage was announced before declaring himself.  While on the presently available evidence (Hopper’s replies have not emerged) we cannot  know the truth, this theory does assume a remarkable degree of naiveté on Hilsdale's part in the face of what must have been a sustained siege on her affections by Hopper.

Another interesting conjecture by Colleary concerns the painting Summer Interior of 1909. This coincides with a period of particular tension between Hilsdale and Hopper in which Hopper clearly expressed his frustrations in the strongest terms. The image is of a partly clad woman lying by an unmade bed in a posture of abjection. The room is Hopper’s childhood bedroom at Nyack, where he slept on his return from France. Given this fact, Colleary suggests that the female figure could reflect his own feelings of dejection. It is evident from his wife’s chronicles of their marriage, however, that he was capable of violence when relations were strained. Perhaps this is a depiction of the subjugated Alta Hilsdale after her possession that Hopper might have liked to imagine.

The most interesting insight provided by the letters concerns the genesis of Soir Bleu, painted in the fall of 1914 in the wake of Hilsdale’s last letter dated October 14 and signed with her married name. The elements of the picture combine to represent Hopper’s feelings of loss, anguish and impotence: the well-dressed couple, the prostitute with her pimp and the clown staring blankly into space. They are also a window into his struggle to accommodate his puritanical 19th-century mores both to his own sexuality and to the changed attitudes of the times.

The examination of the Hilsdale letters promises much, appears to disappoint, but in Colleary’s hands is made to provide much for us to mull over.

My Dear Mr Hopperby Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, Yale University Press, Newhaven and London, 2013. 96pp. ISBN 978-0300181487