Edward Hopper was born in Nyack, New York, and moved to Manhattan to study art in 1899. He enrolled at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, who encouraged his students to paint the world around them. His classmates included George Bellows, Guy Pène du Bois, and Rockwell Kent. He worked as an illustrator to support himself and traveled to Europe three times between 1906 and 1910. In the teens he began to exhibit his work and sold a painting at the Armory Show of 1913, and in 1920 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney gave him his first solo exhibition. Hopper's career took off in the twenties, when his etchings of New York City began to earn him sales as well as acclaim. Hopper moved into the Judson Studio Building on Washington Square in Greenwich Village and began to spend summers in New England. True to Henri's dictates, Hopper found his subjects in both locales, painting isolated individuals in the city and solitary homes near the water.
