a store before opening hours.

an awkward house standing in solitary dignity.

an isolated gas station with one elderly attendant puttering around.

He relentlessly focused on single theme. He studied in Paris in 1906 and sold one canvas at Armory Show. Then he stopped painting for 10 years (he worked as a commercial illustrator). Hopper began "fine art" again at age 43 with etchings, watercolors and oils.

He was reoccupied with loneliness. In his New York Movie an usher is alone in an occupied theater .

Hopper had an affection for man-made objects with few or no people nearby: quiet lighthouses, empty bridges, fragmented city views When he visited New Mexico he had difficulty finding subject matter; he finally discovered an abandoned locomotive to paint.

He was interested in a psychological investigation of American experience; loneliness, lack of variety, daily life. Hopper did not alter his style drastically; paintings of 1950s and 1960s were not much different from those of 1920s, except they were starker, barer, more frontally oriented.

His most famous painting is Nighthawks.

"Nation's art greatest when it most reflects the character of the people."

Hopper rejected the idea that Americans should continue to follow the French.

"If an apprenticeship was necessary, we have served it. Any further relationship means humiliation to us. We are not French and never can be; to impose French character nothing but a veneer upon the surface."