By Jann Haynes Gilmore, PhD, AWA Board Member

American realist painter, Edward Hopper (1882-1967), is quoted as calling his wife of 43 years, “a nagging nuisance” and other unflattering terms during their marriage. Only recently has the importance of “Jo” Hopper (1883-1968) been recognized in new Hopper exhibitions, books, and public media. She referred to him as an ego of “strutting superiority”. ¹

Josephine Hopper was born in New York City into a family of meager existence but raised herself out of poverty through sheer intelligence and perseverance. She received a teaching degree through free tuition at Hunter College in 1904. The next year she began to study art with Robert Henri, becoming his star pupil at the New York School of Art and she traveled to Europe with him and his students. While teaching in New York she began an acting stint with the Washington Square Players, while also working as an artist model, and summering in the requisite art colonies along the East Coast.

Jo Nivison had met Edward Hopper earlier in the Maine coastal art colony of Ogunquit where they were both boarding in the same house but it was only when they met again in 1923 in another art colony, Gloucester, MA, that their courtship was kindled and they married in July 1924. Edward had been working as an illustrator and only occasionally were his paintings being shown. Even before their marriage, Jo began exerting great influence on Edward, suggesting that he concentrate more on watercolor. Her ONLY requirement in their long marriage was that he never use another model other than her. Jo’s acting experience trained her to convert herself into any pose that he required in his painting settings. ²

The marriage would be both fraught and enduring. Every source portrays Jo as a social lover of the world but he, in turn, could go days without speaking or painting. She kept detailed diaries of their creative lives together which have left a clear view of his progress as an artist, seldom hers; as she quickly became his manager. They lived for over four decades in a fourth-floor walkup apartment in New York with no toilet, running water, or refrigerator overlooking Washington Square. As his muse, Jo also assumed all the domestic responsibilities in addition to promoting his career. She considered their paintings to be their children.

In 1923 Jo had a much larger network of art acquaintances in the city, having shown her work alongside icons like Picasso and Modigliani, and her work was included in a group show at the Brooklyn Museum. She suggested to the museum that they include his work, as well. His oil painting, Mansard Roof, caused an immediate sensation and the Museum purchased it for $100 for its permanent collection. As the two artists painted together she constantly functioned as his studio assistant, setting up painting props, titling his works, and promoting his work, even giving his interviews because he was reticent to do so. As his career soared, hers became dormant. But she made peace with her role, writing in a diary “There are several things I’ve been slowly crowded out of by his strutting superiority” and further she wrote: “Painting too—I’ve been slowly crowded out of that too—almost. But I’m ready to fight.” ³

They began to travel widely during summers searching for subject matter in new locations and when he was uninspired, she induced him to paint. A road trip to Charleston, SC in 1929 resulted in few artworks as he was unmoved by the painterly city.  With a small family inheritance, they purchased property on Cape Cod, in South Truro in 1935 and built a studio where they spent the summer months until 1959. They had also purchased a Buick automobile.   Both artists depicted the familiar architecture, sand dunes of Cape Cod and leisure dwellings including hotels that became the talisman for many of his travel paintings. She was always his model in his infamous pensive and evocative scenes. Carol Troyan, in the American Masters program, comments on the United States in the 1920s-1950s when Americans, like the Hoppers, explored new territories for stimulation, escaping urbanity, and succinctly labeling these years as a time of “movement.” ⁴ The Hoppers sometimes depicted themselves painting in their automobile.

Jo’s work was pushed aside as Edward became famous and as a juror and facilitator in the art world, he disparaged her work personally calling it “a little pleasant work” ⁵ and in powerful jurying positions he rejected it. In 1967 after Hopper’s death, Jo Hopper donated all his remaining work to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York including her own work.   It was long believed that the institution discarded her work.  BUT WAIT: Two hundred of her works were found in a remote location in the basement of the museum in 2020. Her work has continued to be considered “uneven”, but evidence validates that it likely never had a chance to evolve and certainly her role in the Hopper legend has long been ignored. Now that is changing. In 2016 Cape Cod’s Provincetown Art Museum exhibited 69 drawings and watercolors by her which elicited great interest. Creating even greater attention, the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, MA staged a major Hopper exhibition and book (catalogue) in 2023 that includes the first important scholarship on Josephine Hopper.  Elliot Bostnick Davis, the author, wrote that in her early efforts to mount this project “I felt aspects of Jo Nivison’s story remained hidden in the shadows of her husband’s brilliant career” so she has included much of Jo’s story in this project. ⁶

I have already written extensively on Olive Rush, Santa Fe painter, and there is more because the Hoppers took a trip to New Mexico from June to late September, 1925, visiting Albuquerque and Santa Fe during the first year of their marriage. They traveled by train to Niagara Falls and on to Chicago and arrived in New Mexico. They were well aware of their New York artist friends including Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Bellows who were living there or had spent time in this land of light and magic scenery.

The two took the healing baths owned by the pueblo Indians for his arthritic knee and attended the ancient Native American corn dance at Santa Domingo pueblo. He liked the “sand hills” near Albuquerque rather than the foot of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Santa Fe. Edward complained of the landscape’s intense colors, light and ‘gaudy’ mountains and said northern New Mexico’s desert was “too picturesque” for him. ⁷ He did paint several scenes including La Penitent (a sacred Spanish religious ritual) which is now owned by the Phillips Collection in DC; railroad locomotives familiar to travel along the Rio Grande; and a unique view of a group of side-street buildings near St. Francis Cathedral, the dominant landmark in Santa Fe [this painting’s vantage point is lost today].

While in Santa Fe, the couple visited their NY acquaintances including Olive Rush. Olive Rush’s Papers contain a letter that records their visit. Jo later wrote Rush a thank you letter back in New York where Rush had encouraged them to see her work which was currently showing.

Jo Hopper wrote:

Dear Olive Rush—
Your show is charming. I didn’t know a thing about it until saw this Sat night & went right up Mon. a.m. but had only a moment & that was the end of it.

Mr. Price at the Ferargil was complaining at the detached manner of it all— you in Chicago, Mrs. Somebody suppose to be responsible. In Europe & nobody to give data to help with publicity—“too detached” he—for complaining. I said you had a lot more—lovely things & why ever didn’t he not have them too.

The beasties are precious—it is a lovely show & I am glad his mightious McBride saw it to notice. I suppose you have this. There isn’t anything in The Tribune Sunday. Had I known about your show, I’d have been on the lookout for paper comment for you. Suppose someone has been watching for you.  E. Hopper who is agin’ all female work on principle, was honest enough to say he liked it when he found he did—I think beasties got to him too. “nice color & an intimate sensitive touche [sic]. Unwillingly volunteered.  They are beautiful –& so what only a woman can do. I love them.

We’ll see you again someday—within a year or two likely.
Cheerily,
Jo N. Hopper ⁸

This communication was followed by a Christmas card that same year whose hand message was addressed to Violet Rush from Edward & Jo Hopper [Rush likely took exception to Jo’s mistaking her first name. She marked it out with a pencil followed by an exclamation point].  The cover of the card shows a simplified image of his iconic mansard roofs and the message inside reads: “Thank you for your charming card. We’re late getting ours off—they wouldn’t dry. Hope you and your work and your ducky house are doing finely.” ⁹ She signed: “Cheerily, Jo
Hopper.”

Despite the shadow she accepted behind Edward, I believe that she felt empowered by her role in making him famous and was also resolute in her belief in herself and her art while understanding “what only a woman can do”. She never stopped painting. Known to always sign her letters “Cheerily,” Jo never allowed Edward to destroy her own joy, personality, or art. She lived ‘Cheerily’.

Endnotes

1. Raquel Laneri, “The woman who made Hopper famous finally seizes the spotlight,”
New York Post, April 11, 2020.
2. Hopper: An American love story, American Masters series, 2022, PBS Television, contributor:
Carmenita Higginbotham (Virginia Commonwealth University). This program provides an excellent view of Edward Hopper and to a greater degree than most treatments, the powerful role Jo Hopper played in his life. Contributing scholars, academics and authors add important cultural dimensions and background to this symbiotic marriage.
3. Laneri.
4. Carol Troyen, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Hopper: An American love story.
5. Georgian Manea, “A Full-Fledged Painter: Josephine Nivison Hopper”, Daily Art Magazine, March 12, 2025, dailyartmagazine.com.
6. Eliot Boswick Davis, Edward Hopper & Cape Ann: Illuminating An American Landscape,
Cape Ann Museum/Rizzoli Electa, 2022, p. 221.
7. Gail Levin, Hopper’s Places, Berkeley, UCA Press 1985; 1998, pages 114-116. Levin, an art historian, is a
Hopper specialist and the first curator of his work held at the Whitney Museum of Art.
8. Letter: Jo Hopper to Olive Rush, 1925, Archives of American Art, Olive Rush Papers,
Series 2, Correspondence, C-L, Box 2, Folder 8, G-H, 22-28.
Frederic N. Price (1884-1963) founder of Feragil Gallery, East 57th St., NY, (1915-1955).
Beasties refers to Rush’s deer subject matter during the 1920s.
Henry McBride (1867-1962) highly influential NY art critic, considered the dean of
American art criticism who wrote in many sources including The New York Sun and The Dial magazine. He early supported modernism in art.
9. Christmas Greeting: Hoppers to Olive Rush, 1925, Archives of American Art, Olive Rush Papers, Series 2, Correspondence, C-L, Box 2, Folder 8, G-H, 26-28.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Robert Henri, The Art Student (Miss Josephine Nivison), detail, oil, 1905. Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, en.m.wikipedia.org.

2. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Photograph: Edward & Jo Hopper, 1933, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, whitney.org.

3. Edward Hopper, The Mansard Roof, watercolor, 1923, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

4. Jann Haynes Gilmore, Sketch of Hoppers, Photograph of Hoppers, 1930s-Cape Cod [www.pinerest.co.kr], ink and watercolor wash, 2023.

5. Edward Hopper, St. Francis’ Towers, Santa Fe, NM, watercolor, 1925, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.

6. Josephine N. Hopper, People with Umbrellas, oil, n.d., Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

7. Edward Hopper, Jo in Wyoming, watercolor, 1946, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. [The couple’s infamous fights were often over who was to drive their automobile. Jo recorded in her journal that he pulled her from behind the wheel on Cape Cod by her legs as she sprawled on the road. On their auto painting excursions, he took the more comfortable back seat while she contended with the steering wheel in the front seat].

8. Edward Hopper, Two Comedians, oil, 1966. Private Collection. [As one of his last paintings, many believe Hopper painted this pantomime pean to his creative partner
symbolizing their love for the theater and the gestures of each acknowledging the love of other].

9. Greeting Card to Olive Rush, Greetings-Hoppers, 1925, Olive Rush Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.