Revisiting Hopper’s Lighthouse

Recently, I took some time to explore Southern Maine.  Besides great fall foliage, hiking and lobster (which were all also part of my trip!), the state is known for its majestic lighthouses.  I was able to visit a few including the beautiful one at Cape Elizabeth outside Portland.  This lighthouse in particular may already be familiar to lovers of American art.

American realist painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967) may best be known for his psychological urban scenes (like Nighthawks and Chop Suey) but he also painted lovely landscapes.  Over the course of nine summers between 1914 and 1929 spent in Maine, he produced numerous oil sketches and watercolors exploring the coastline and its small villages.  These soft and calm images seem somewhat incongruous with what I encountered in Maine where the coastal environment was rocky, rough and stark.

Do you think this is this Montana, Arizona or in fact Rockland, Maine? – Edward Hopper, Lime Rock Quarry II, 1926, watercolor, private collection

The Cape Elizabeth lighthouse is featured in two paintings.  The keepers house and tower have largely been preserved since Hopper’s visit.  In the MFA image below, the coastline has either eroded dramatically in the last ~90 years or was filled in by the artist so that the yellow-green grass in the foreground would balance with the blue of the sea.  I tend to think that the rock was eroded in 1927 as you can see some plants and then the cliff face just to the left of the fence.  I stood at the edge of the land to get the modern photograph which mostly seems to fit with the perspective of the house.  Even if I’d stepped a few more feet inland (right), the cliff would have been visible and if I moved further back, then I was begin moving up a fortification embankment.  It seems likely the landscape was altered in the image to highlight the lighthouse and associated buildings.

Edward Hopper Lighthouse and Buildings, Portland Head, Cape Elizabeth, Maine (1927), watercolor on paper at Museum of Fine Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Cape Elizabeth today as viewed for Hopper’s position

The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut owns a strangely cropped image of the Cape Elizabeth Keeper’s House.  The light house is cut just below its top as if to over emphasize the home.  It’s actually each of these partial architectural elements – two half sheds, the light and the fence – that make the image so interesting.  Today without the shed to the right and the fence, the composition seems way out of balance.

It also seemed like the modern parking lot has dropped the current ground level.  The white ring around the lighthouse tower is just barely visible over the roof today regardless of how far back I tried to stand whereas it is well above the roof in Hopper’s image.

Edward Hopper, Captain Strout’s House, Portland Head, (1927) watercolor on paper at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut

Cape Elizabeth house today as viewed in Hopper’s image

Last year the Bowdoin College Museum of Art staged an exhibit of many of Hopper’s Maine scenes.  They’ve also put together an interesting set of comparisons of paintings and the locations today.  I’m particularly impressed with how well they matched the rocks of Monhegan Island (below).  Perhaps something to see on my next trip to Maine!

Edward Hopper, “Rocky Shore (Gull Rock)”, oil on wood, Whitney Museum of American Art and recent photograph by Geoffrey Clements