Portrait Head

Portrait Head is among a group of five similar works that are Edward Hopper's earliest efforts in printmaking. All are monotypes, a single-impression print made by pressing a sheet of paper against a smooth plate on which an image has been created in a slow-drying ink, usually by scraping, wiping, or brushing through a uniformly applied layer. In each monochromatic work, Hopper portrayed a male subject from the waist or chest up and turned slightly to the right. He roughly scraped away through the irregularly applied surface of ink to reveal key areas that suggest highlights on the side of the face and body, leaving the eyes deeply shadowed. Four of the works seem to portray ordinary, contemporary individuals, perhaps Hopper's colleagues. In the Terra Foundation's work, however, the white areas suggest the highlights on a hat or helmet, a possibly bearded face, and the shiny surface of what might be a breastplate. The result can be interpreted as a man in the costume of a sixteenth-century conquistador, a romantic historical subject with no parallel in Hopper's work.

Hopper evidently made his five monotypes while a student at the New York School of Art, for the Terra Foundation's work was printed on the back of a postmarked envelope from the school. There, Hopper studied with the painter and charismatic teacher William Merritt Chase, who had been among the first artists to champion the practice of monotype printmaking in America, in the 1880s. Another of Hopper's instructors, Robert Henri, also made monotypes, as his Satyr and Nymph (TF 1996.61) attests. As important portrait painters, Chase and Henri additionally may have influenced the subjects of Hopper's monotypes. Under their direction Hopper painted numerous portrait heads during his six years at the school. Thereafter, however, he made few such works. As a painter he preferred landscapes and scenes of everyday life; as a printmaker, he found a more compatible medium in the so-called intaglio methods of etching and dry-point, which allowed him to create his sometimes haunting images with delicate lines, subtle shading, and open, almost uninked areas of white. Yet, as seen here, the dramatic darks and lights of his monotypes anticipate the expressive role of shadow in Hopper's mature art.

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints. (exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art). New York and London, England: W. W. Norton & Company in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979. Pl. 3.

Ives, Colta, David W. Kiehl, Sue Welsh Reed and Barbara Shapiro. The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980. Fig. 33, p. 43 (illustrates another monotype of a man's head by Hopper in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection).