Edward Hopper & Dike Blair: Gloucester

Portraits of the picturesque Massachusetts city, painted a century apart

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the coastal city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, long a major hub for America's fishing industry, became a celebrated summer resort for prominent American painters and writers including Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, Cecilia Beaux and T.S. Eliot. As a young man visiting Gloucester, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) turned away from the allure of its ragged coast line and instead created atmospheric watercolors of homes, lighthouses and street scenes in Gloucester. In this volume, art historian Robert Hobbs revisits these works from the 1920s, which he positions alongside the work of New York-based painter Dike Blair (born 1952), who, a century later, has created a new body of work centered on the small fishing city.