Edward Hopper found stillness in motion and geometry in light. His simultaneously strong and subtle images of houses, streets and intimate rooms invite us to quiet our minds and open our eyes to the beauty of the commonplace as revealed by shadow, sun and the warmth or artificial lights.

Hopper takes us down city streets, past rows of shops waiting to open, into cafes and diners, past intimate scenes on porches and stoops and lets us peer voyeuristically into windows. He doesn’t just leave us in front of his images, he guides our eye, saying look, look how the shadows show you this form, look how the sunlight makes this space reveal itself, look at the inside and the outside of this architectural form at the same time. Look.

Hopper, in addition to his fascination with shadow and light, had a fascination with architecture, not in the sense of advanced designs, history or monuments, but in the streets and houses and buildings we encounter every day. His fascination is in the corner of a storefront, the edge of an office building, the porch of a house or the corner of a room.

Hopper takes particular delight in showing us windows, all manner of windows, from the inside looking out, whether from quiet cafes or intimate bedrooms, or from the outside looking in, particularly in night scenes where the inside reveals itself more brightly in the surrounding darkness, or even in his famous Nighthawks diner scene where outside and inside are separated more by the presence of light than by the physical barrier of glass.

Hopper’s technique is deceptively simple, There is no great flourish of painterly display, or dazzling realist detail, he paints directly, almost brusquely, with little regard for anything but conveying the scene and, in particular, the geometry of the scene, all of the planes and angles and intersecting forms. Even his images of people are geometrically composed. A friend of mine recently remarked that Hopper paints his people exactly the same way he paints his architecture.

This becomes particularly apparent in an image like Summertime, in the collection of The Delaware Art Museum (above, lower right), in which the young woman almost appears to be part of the building, her red skin mirrored by the reds in the doorway, her white dress matching the facade of the building and its columns, and the translucent folds of which are echoes of the windblown curtains in the open window.

I think geometry is the key, whether Hopper ever thought of it that way or not, geometry, and his deep, vibrant colors, give his quiet paintings of unassuming scenes a remarkable strength.

Hopper started his career with a correspondence course with the Correspondence School of Illustrating in 1900. He later attended the New York School of Art, where he studied with William Merrit Chase, Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller. He supported himself for many years as an illustrator, but was not satisfied with that field and kept pursuing gallery representation unsuccessfully until the age of 40. Since then he has become one of the major figures of American art and his work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.

There is a terrific opportunity for those on the Boston, D.C. and Chicago areas to see major retrospective of Hopper’s work this year and next. The show, simply titled “Edward Hopper”, is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from now to August 19, 2007. It then moves to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., where I hope to see it, for a run from September 16, 2007 to January 21, 2008, and finishes at the Art Institute of Chicago from February 16 to May 11, 2008.

The exhibit includes many of Hopper’s “greatest hits”, including Summertime, Chop Suey, Early Sunday Morning, New York Movie and Nighthawks.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has a special feature devoted to the exhibit that includes an interactive tour of some of the works in the exhibition, though the images are small.

For a better overview of Hopper’s work on the web, try Bert Christensen’s Cyberspace Gallery, Art Renewal Center, or the other resources I’ve gathered for you below. Art Renewal probably has the largest reproductions, and perhaps the greatest number, as well as including some of Hopper’s etchings, but the color in their images of the paintings often look off to my eye. The reproductions in Bert Christensen’s Cyberspace Gallery are smaller, but their color is truer and he presents a nice selection.

Hopper, who struggled for years to sell a painting, is one of the most popular American artists and there are numerous reproductions and books of his work.

19th Century French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage had a short life. He first gained notice in the Salon as a painter of rural life, a theme to which he would return later in his career. His most noted painting during his lifetime was perhaps a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, which won him the cross of the Leigon of Honor.

Today, however, those who have an appreciation for late 19th Century Academic painting are most likely to focus on his image of “Joan of Arc” (sometimes called “Joan of Arc Hearing Voices” – image above), the original of which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The painting is quite large at almost nine feet to a side (100×110 inches or 254x279cm), and is striking when you stand in front of it. Bastien has chosen to bathe the young Joan’s moment of revelation from the voices in a soft, even light, making the highest contrast that of her bare arms and upturned face, and the light wall of her parents’ cottage, which serves as a stage against which the tableaux of the three saints can be seen.

The images of the saints are subtle and you only see them after fully registering Joan’s figure, which is painted with a palpable sense of realism. The rest of the scene emerges from the tangle of fruit tree branches and saplings. The effect is that the painting unfolds for you in layers, transitioning gradually from a peasant girl in a garden to the transcendent moment of inspiration for the national heroine of France.

Bastien’s command of rural subjects came from his upbringing in a small village. He used an apple tree in his grandfather’s garden for the tree in in “Joan of Arc”, and based the cottage on his family’s barn. Jeff Patterson has written an interesting article on this painting.

Bastien shows a similar command of the subtleties of diffuse lighting and tonal contrast in his other work, as in this painting of a young peasant girl.

He based his realism on an appreciation for nature as it is, and his painting and philosophy had an effect on the plein air painters of the late 19th Century, including the American painter J. Alden Weir and Spanish realist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida. It’s also interesting to note that Bastien himself reportedly was particularly inspired by Jan van Eyck.

The artist’s career was hampered by ill-health and his life was cut short in 1884 at the age of 36.

Sitting astride the Arno river, like a ruby on a blue ribbon, Firenze (Florence to us English speakers) is one if Italy’s most beautiful cities. (How the British got “Florence” out of “Firenze”, I don’t know.) Firenze, (OK, OK, I’ll call it Florence) is also the official sister city of Philadelphia, here in the U.S., a fact of which I would wager most residents of both cities are unaware.

Florence was the center of the italian Renaissance and has been painted by some of the greatest artists in history, but I was particularly intrigued to see it painted by a contemporary American realist like Joseph Paquet (images above top left and right). These are part of a one-artist show at the Coleman Fine Art gallery in Charleston, South Carolina called “Mostly Florence“, that runs from now to June 2nd, 2007.

Paquet works in a loose, open style, not quite impressionist, but full of lively brushstrokes and rich color. He also has a solid ability to see and use value contrasts, a characteristic of his work that particularly shines in his paintings of Florence, with its wonderful architecture brought into high relief in the warm sun of the Tuscan plains. I was immediately reminded of my own time in Florence, more strongly than I would be by viewing photographs. I particularly enjoy his night scenes, both of intimate street corners and the sweeping vistas looking out over the Duomo from the Piazzalle Michelangelo and other vantage points in the hills “Alta Arno”.

Those same qualities of Paquet’s work also stand out in his painting of “Industrial Landscape” here in the U.S., as well as his more traditional landscapes, which are also highly evocative of time and place. The work on Paquet’s own site is divided into those categories, along with “Interiors and Portraits” and “Seascapes and Marine”, but within the broader classifications of work that is currently available or achived.

Paquet studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and his work includes plein air landscapes from that city as well as from his native Minnesota and from his travels. He also studied with John Osborne, who he credits with enabling him to see beyond the scene before him, particularly when creating a studio work based on sketches painted on location, and utilize his own artistic judgement in creating his compositions.

Paquet’s work has been featured in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, the Classical Realism Journal, The Artist Magazine and American Artist.