With less than two months remaining before the opening of Edward Hopper & Cape Ann, it's a good time to think about Edward Hopper's passion for architecture and how captivated he was with the houses he found here in Gloucester during the 1920s. There were several hotspots around the city that particularly fascinated Hopper, including the Fort neighborhood. Writing in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition, guest curator Elliot Bostwick Davis calls out two houses on the Fort that attracted Edward Hopper and were captured in his paintings.

"During his first visit to Cape Ann, Hopper had been drawn to Gloucester's Italian Quarter with its acid green and bright yellow houses outlined in contrasting colors, a touch of the brilliantly painted fishing villages of Murano in New England, as well as the peaked red roofs, and angled rocks that [Leon] Kroll assured him would appeal to the modernists who admired Paul Cézanne. Two of his 1923 watercolors reflect a new perspective on the Italian Quarter, even when he may be painting the same house that caught his eye before. In Italian Quarter (1923), he depicts a subdued and dignified clapboard house in grey with red trim that dwarfs two women stopping to talk in a small patch of sunlight.... The mood is somber, as though the greys and deep olive greens of the clapboards, rising proudly above their brick foundations, protect and embrace the intimate exchange between the two women within their close-knit Italian community. The buildings frame them on all sides and effectively close out the larger world of Gloucester's active fishing industry and streets supporting steady streams of modern automobiles and trolleys.

For House in the Italian Quarter (1923), Hopper may have selected a different view of a similar yellow house with bright red trim at the corners and outlining the windows as appeared in his earlier [1912] painting of Italian Quarter, Gloucester. This time around...Hopper's house appears alive.... From his low vantage point on a road that curves slightly upwards towards the right, Hopper's House in the Italian Quarter appears to soak up the Cape Ann sunshine with eyes wide open. Below them, a protruding bay and portico form a nose bridge, with stairs that suggest a mouth open like a jaw onto the small front yard...."

-Elliot Bostwick Davis ■

To learn more about Edward Hopper's love of houses, please plan on visiting Edward Hopper & Cape Ann this summer. Tickets go on sale June 1 and can be booked here.

(This conversation has been edited for readability)

Leon Doucette
Thanks for joining me today, Jeff!

Jeff Weaver
I'm happy to be here.

Leon Doucette
As you know, I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about "houses" as a motif in your work. I've noticed that they appear quite frequently. In fact, there often seems to be a focus on the geometric forms you find in the landscape. When did you first realize that you were drawn to geometric subject matter?

Jeff Weaver
That's a good question. When I was younger, all I did were organic-type things. Figure drawing in school for instance. But later, when I got serious about painting, I started paying more attention to the things that excited me visually. I was drawn to the lights and darks on houses and buildings for instance. I think that's what got me going. I did a lot of sign painting early on too, which requires a calculated approach. It could be that my brain switched around and went into the world of geometry as a result of that. But some of it is this city too. If you look closely at Gloucester itself, you see houses all packed in and jumbled on top of each other. That, to me, is interesting. Of course, other artists painted these houses, like Edward Hopper. But I actually really like some of those Austrian painters like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Schiele is known for more figurative work, but he did these beautiful city drawings where he abstracted the forms in interesting ways. ■

Continue reading the conversation here.

This year, eighth graders and third graders across Cape Ann considered their homes by making artwork to be installed at the Museum. Eighth graders drew a view from their window or their community as a response to Edward Hopper's paintings of the area. Unlike many artists who have visited, the Hoppers often turned their backs to the ocean and painted the local streets and architecture. Hopper's Houses, now a recognizable part of the Gloucester landscape and the focus of regular docent walking tours, were painted from the outside looking in. Nearly 300 panes of plexiglass created in classrooms across Gloucester, Rockport, Manchester, and Essex create a visual array of sites around Cape Ann as seen by the students who live here. The students chose subjects ranging from recognizable icons like the Man at the Wheel, Tuck's Point, and Motif No. 1 to images of their own backyards, local woods, and their schools. A video compilation of the works in progress can be seen here.

CAM Educators also visited every public third-grade classroom and worked with students to create block prints as an artistic expression of place inspired by the Folly Cove Designers. Students had thoughtful conversations about how "somewhere" becomes a "place" through the memories and experiences we associate with it. These memories inspire the sense of belonging so eloquently captured in the prints of the Folly Cove Designers and of this year's hard-working and enthusiastic third grade students. The two students' exhibitions, A View From My Window and Our Place; Our Stories, will be on display through June 4. Stop by to see the work of over 675 students as they reflect on their homes, created through 75 school visits between October - March 2023. ■

In 2013, the Cape Ann Museum invited contemporary photographer Gail Albert Halaban to show her works exploring Edward Hopper's Gloucester's paintings. Hopper Redux featured ten over-sized color photographs of houses around Gloucester that Hopper was drawn to during his visits in 1923, 1924, 1926 and 1928.

Now, a decade later, CAM has again reached out to Halaban, inviting her to show two photographs this summer in connection with our upcoming Hopper exhibition - Marty Welch's House, and Hodgkins House in Riverdale. Gail's involvement a decade ago provides opportunity to revisit her 2013 artist statement and her thoughts about houses.

"Edward Hopper has served as an important historical precedent for my work for a long time and the influence is made explicit in this series. I photograph the exact locations in Gloucester, where Hopper painted and I spent summers during my childhood. The photographs elicit an uncanny familiarity. They echo Hopper's paintings, but they are decidedly photographic and of the present day. In this sense they seem to oscillate between the historical past and the contemporary present.

I am interested in how the architectural forms themselves register this complicated temporality, as even in Hopper's day many of the buildings represented a style that was already historical. Although Hopper is typically known as a realist, I have chosen to emphasize the psychological character of his paintings, shooting his original locations with striking lighting that make buildings seem like metaphors for emotions. As such they become dramatic characters in their own right: dynamic and evolving.

Taking cues from Hitchcock's mise-en-scène, I render these already familiar tableaux uncanny. This highlighted sense of artifice underscores my photographs' status as re-presentations."

-Gail Albert Halaban ■

About four decades before Edward Hopper started painting houses on Cape Ann, a duo known as Corliss & Ryan captured hundreds of Gloucester houses through photography. The Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives' Corliss & Ryan Collection contains approximately 600 such photographs, primarily of the homes and businesses of Gloucester in the 1880s. Unfortunately, little is known about these two avid photographers. There is no record of them having resided in Gloucester at any point, and even their first names have been lost to history. What little evidence does exist of their time in town comes from a May 1882 column in the Cape Ann Advertiser stating that the photographers had just finished photographing Main Street. Despite this mystery, we are grateful that this expansive collection has found a home in our archives, and that their photography continues to delight researchers who often recognize the featured buildings. The above video highlights approximately eighty photographs from this collection. Researchers are welcome to view the rest at the CAM Library & Archives each Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. ■