In Hopper’s charcoal drawing, hard-edged shadows cut across the mansard roof of a late 19th-century home. Unruly brush creeps across the foreground, gradually encroaching on the porch, while a lone bird glides across the otherwise empty sky. The scene is still and silent, inhabited only by the slow rhythms of the natural world.

The drawing, which Hopper made during a summer visit to Gloucester, Massachusetts, shows the back side of a house built in 1873 for Gardner K. Wonson, a local entrepreneur. Hopper’s images of Gilded Age homes in New England stood out within a modern art culture that viewed such architecture as outmoded and excessive. Describing Hopper’s Gloucester pictures, the critic Lewis Mumford proclaimed that “Hopper has indeed isolated an aesthetic moment of the period and hinted . . . that our notions of dinginess and sooty horror are a little exaggerated.”

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)