Universalist Church,

1926

New York realist artist Edward Hopper first traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1912 on a painting excursion. He returned in 1923 and, just as Winslow Homer had fifty years before, began working in watercolor. A town on Cape Ann founded by fishermen in 1663, Gloucester became a thriving art colony visited by early Modernists such as Stuart Davis, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast. By 1924, Hopper had produced enough work to mount an exhibition of watercolors at the Frank K. M. Rehn Gallery in New York, which sold out. Now able to give up his career as a commercial illustrator, he returned to Gloucester again in the summer of 1926, when he was painting primarily in Rockland, Maine, and executed a series of water­colors that included <em>Universalist Church</em>. Initially, Hopper vowed not to use this church as a motif. His wife, Jo, remembered: "Hopper avoided the crowds painting views of the Universalist Meeting House on Middle Street. Not painting the church, he sat in front of it and painted the Davis house across the street." Perhaps unable to resist the church’s combined symbolic and aesthetic values, Hopper finally joined the "crowds" in painting it. Founded in 1779 as the first Universalist Church in America, the structure is represented here through its steeple, since Hopper chose to obscure the rest of the building with intervening houses. Building up his thin layers of watercolor in one sitting, he could imbue even these thick structures with the iridescence of New England light. Hopper’s architectural subjects have traditionally been interpreted in anthropomorphic terms, as surrogates for the lone human figures that inhabit his paintings. In this instance, the lines of the roofs adjacent to the church lead the eye across both axes of the image to the steeple. Hopper’s view of the church from below underscores both the spiritual resolve and the physical resilience embodied by this historic American structure.