The Railroad

In Edward Hopper's etching The Railroad, a track worker or switchman emerges from the deep shadows of a bank near a bend in a rural stretch of railroad track. The composition is divided by a slightly tilted pole cropped at the top edge of the image. It is echoed on the right by a line of telegraph poles that follow the track as it curves in the distance. To the left, the gabled roofs and chimneys of a cluster of modest houses, visible above the earthen ridge separating them from the tracks, accent the horizon. The scene juxtaposes a settlement rooted in place and a means of traveling somewhere else. Perhaps more subtly, Hopper's railroad image hints at industrialization changing the character of rural America.

Subways and trains are the subjects of several of Hopper's prints and paintings. The Railroad, however, deals with the theme of rail transport without explicitly showing a train. Instead, the workman crossing the tracks, the stark slanting poles, and the curve of empty track evoke the stillness left in the wake of a just-passed locomotive. Hopper often worked out the compositions of his prints in drawings; this one is based on a drawing now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.During the formative period of his career, when he still supported himself as a commercial artist and illustrator, Hopper concentrated on printmaking. He made The Railroad after several years of perfecting his command of intaglio technique. The image dramatically contrasts and balances areas of light and dark: the sky, which dominates the upper half of the print, is evoked by the smooth unetched portions of the etching plate, which remained uninked during the printing process; the ground is rendered by a tangled network of inked lines. To create the dense, almost solid black tones in the left portion of the image, the artist used dense scribbled cross-hatching, yet he carefully modeled the railroad worker's torso. In 1922, shortly after it was made, this print was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York City and at the Brooklyn Society of Etchers, in Brooklyn, New York.

America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper, Terra Foundation for American Art and the Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, UK (organizers.) Venue: Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology, Oxford, UK, March 23, 2018–July 22, 2018 [exh. cat.]

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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. 87 (etching), pl. 88 (drawing for etching).

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Levin, Gail. Edward Hopper: A Catalog Raisonné. 4 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Company in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995. Vol. III: fig. 231.1, p. 156.

Bourguignon, Katherine M., Lauren Kroiz, and Leo G. Mazow. America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper. Oxford, United Kingdom: Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology–University of Oxford, 2018. Ill. p. 139, cat. no. 40 (color).