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History
Like all sensible New Yorkers, Edward and Jo Hopper decamped to more forgiving climes in the summer, but not entirely because of the intolerable heat and humidity. Their retreat was almost unfailingly a New England one. There, Edward found the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the fishing fleets at Cape Ann and the lighthouses along the coast, fair compensation for the arduous process of creating urban portraits of ordinary people alone with their thoughts and moods and brought to fruition with plodding precision and an inescapable insistence on perfection. From 1930 onward, the Hoppers would spend almost half the year in South Truro where they constructed a plain, shingled home and studio of their own. Financed by Jo’s inheritance, it was built the summer of 1934 upon a grassy knoll above Corn Hill Beach and the Massachusetts Bay surrounded by sandy hills and stands of pines and scrub oak. They would spend thirty summers here, and Edward would complete about 75 watercolors and 43 oils of local scenes as well as 20 major paintings brought from his Greenwich Village studio on Washington Square.
MoreMARKET INSIGHTS
- The quantity of top-quality Edward Hopper watercolors is finite. Since 1986, fewer than 50 Edward Hopper watercolors have appeared at auction. To put this into perspective, during the same period over 2,700 Andy Warhol works on paper (including drawings) have appeared at auction.
- Of the 357 watercolors Hopper created, 215 are in museum collections worldwide, where they will likely remain. This leaves 142 watercolors in private collections that could become available for sale.
- Of the 366 oil paintings by Hopper, 321 are in museums, leaving only 45 in private collections.
- The scarcity of important works has led to a very strong market performance for the relatively few available works to appear in the marketplace over the past 10 years. The graph by Art Market Research shows that in the last 10 years, paintings by Hopper have increased at a 40% annual rate of return.
Top Oil Paintings Sold at Auction




Top Watercolors Sold at Auction



Comparable Watercolors Sold at Auction

- Slightly larger than Spindly Locusts
- Similar in scene and year (no figures, no architecture, 1938)
- Selling for $1.15 million in 2019

- Similar size and scene (no figures, no architecture)
- Slightly more simplistic in color and format
- Sold $300,000 over high estimate for almost $900,000 in 2014 – market has improved greatly since

- This sale from 2004 shows the increase in Hopper’s market, today this would be worth 3x what it sold for then
Comparable Paintings in Museum Collections



