Born and raised in Nyack, New York, Edward Hopper became one of the best-known painters of 20th-century American genre scenes and landscape. He was especially known for interiors with isolated figures, rural landscapes, and marine scenes. During much of his career, he split his time between Greenwich Village, New York in a row house facing Washington Square and Truro, Massachusetts on water with a view towards Provincetown. Hopper, used to water views from childhood, was raised in a home on the Hudson River. He showed artistic talent as a child and following two years of illustration work in 1901, he became a student at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, the latter of whom Hopper credited as his most influential teacher. In 1907, he went to Paris and was exposed to Impressionism, which affected his interest in light and pattern but did not dissuade him from basic realism with defined shapes, many of them from architecture. Between 1915 and 1928, he completed nearly seventy etchings and drypoints, much influenced by the light-contrast techniques of Rembrandt and Meryon. In 1929, he spent three weeks in Charleston, South Carolina, and produced eleven watercolors, mostly outdoor landscapes but one a church interior.
