Attic in Nyack (Hopper House)

Edward Hopper's "Attic in Nyack (Hopper House)" (1899) is a charcoal drawing on cream wove paper from the very beginning of Hopper's career. Hopper (1882–1967) was 17 years old when he made this drawing, which depicts the attic of his childhood home in Nyack, New York. The drawing shows the sloped ceilings, dormer windows, and accumulated objects of the attic space with the careful observation that would characterize all of Hopper's work. The charcoal technique is already assured, the young artist handling the medium with a sensitivity to light and shadow that anticipates the great paintings of his maturity. The attic, with its play of light through windows and its atmosphere of stored memories and abandoned objects, was a subject that Hopper would return to throughout his career. This early drawing is important for understanding Hopper's development: it shows that his characteristic vision—the focus on light, on empty or transitional spaces, on the poetry of the ordinary—was already present in his teenage work.

Hopper's early drawings document the formation of one of America's most important painters, showing that his characteristic vision of light, space, and solitude was already emerging in his teenage years.

This early drawing of the attic of Hopper's childhood home contains the seeds of his mature art: the sensitivity to light, the attention to ordinary spaces, the sense of solitude and suspended time that would define his greatest paintings.