Edward and Jo Hopper: 'Croix de Guerre - a Medal for Distinguished Combat'

Edward and Jo Hopper - 1938 (click photo for larger image)Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) artist wife, Jo, was his only model and was crucial to his success. On their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary she told him they deserved a 'croix de guerre - a medal for distinguished combat', and Hopper responded by making them a coat of arms out of a rolling pin and a ladle. When she married Edward Hopper, Josephine Nivison was 41, and had been painting successfully for 16 years. Her work had been shown alongside that of Modigliani and Picasso, Maurice Prendergast and Man Ray. She regularly sold drawings to the New York Tribune , the Evening Post and the Chicago Herald Examiner. Hopper’s rare figures included a bedraggled nude staring out of a window, a woman in black reading on a train, an usherette in a cinema, a redheaded 'nighthawk', a blonde on a bed, a buxom young secretary in an office--and others. Jo Hopper was all of these women...and none of them.

Edward Hopper - Nighthawks - 1942 - Oil on canvas, 30 x 60 in; The Art Institute of Chicago (click photo for larger image)Starting shortly after their marriage in 1924, Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine (Jo), kept a journal in which he would, using a pencil, make a sketch-drawing of each of his paintings, along with a precise description of certain technical details. Jo Hopper would then add additional information in which the themes of the painting are, to some degree, illuminated. A review of the page on which ‘’Nighthawks’’ is entered shows (in Edward Hopper’s handwriting) that the intended name of the work was actually ‘’Night Hawks’’, and that the painting was completed on January 21, 1942. Jo’s handwritten notes about the painting give considerably more detail, including the interesting possibility that the painting's evocative title may have had its origins as a reference to the beak-shaped nose of the man at the bar.