Cape Cod, in Edward Hopper’s Light
The lighthouse Edward Hopper painted in 1930.
THIS time of year Corn Hill Beach in Truro, Mass., on the outer arm of Cape Cod, is a joyful, teeming playground. At low tide, the warm water of Cape Cod Bay recedes to expose banks of smooth sand, which swarm with kids, dogs and blissfully vacationing parents. As the sun sinks toward Provincetown, it cuts through a hazy summer sky, shimmering off the quicksilver bay. It picks out Corn Hill, at the north side of the beach, and daubs the tiny cottages at its crest in sure, vibrant strokes.
Interest Guide
At that moment, the sandy rise is no longer simply Corn Hill, the site of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ first encounter with the fruits of indigenous agriculture, but it is “Corn Hill,” Edward Hopper’s iconic 1930 oil painting.
Hopper spent nearly 40 of his 84 summers in Truro, the rolling, lightly populated stretch of the Cape between Provincetown and Wellfleet. Together, these three communities comprise the Outer Cape: lands that, while connected to the mainland, have long served as a haven for those seeking something different. The Pilgrims, who landed there in 1620, gave way to 19th-century whalers, and then to the artists, writers and freethinkers who began spending summers there nearly a century ago.
Edward Hopper first visited the Cape in 1930. In 1934, he and his wife, Josephine, built a modest summer house — a classic Cape, but for a huge north-facing window. On a sand bluff, the house overlooks nothing but bearberry, broom crowberry, dune grass and an empty stretch of Fisher Beach. Over the decades, as his work developed, Hopper returned each year to this simplicity: old wooden houses in an open landscape of beach, heath and woodlot.
Hopper’s Truro paintings, especially from the 1930s, outline an important crossroads in his work: isolated buildings in broad vistas are meditations on form and color that steer toward the abstract while remaining figurative. “There is a specificity to what he is doing in his Truro paintings that he didn’t have elsewhere,” said Carter Foster, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. “His watercolors especially remain truer to what he actually saw.”
But looking for Hopper’s vistas in Truro can be challenging. The Cape was originally forested, but had been denuded by settlement. Hopper painted at the end of the treeless era; since then, pines and oaks have grown lustily, filling the landscape with dense green. Canvases like “High Road” (1931) feature angular roofs as blocks of color against the soft but vivid undulations of the postglacial landscape. But today, that stretch of Route 6A is leafy: darker and more comfortably familiar.
So visiting Hopper’s Outer Cape requires two approaches: finding his locations, but also finding his landscapes — places he may never have painted but that still retain the character of that era.
Though Hopper almost never painted the vista from his studio, the so-called “Hopper Landscape” — the view from his studio window — retains that openness. But this year, ground was broken for a trophy house in the Hopper Landscape. The controversy around it is a case study of the Outer Cape’s modern dynamics: as more and more second homes are built, the bucolic landscape is undergoing creeping suburbanization. Development is guided by what Deborah Minsky, director and curator of the Highland Museum in Truro, calls “an unwritten understanding of what is appropriate here.” Inevitably, the land has become an invisible patchwork of covenants, customary uses, gray areas — and lawsuits.
Fortunately, much of the Outer Cape is protected as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore, and the few old buildings within the park seem classic Hopper: the wooden tower of the Old Harbor Lifesaving Station at Race Point pokes above a sand dune misted with the grayish green of beach grass.
On a summer evening, the luminous sky traces the blocky, weathered wood building with bands of soft blue, salty gray and creamy tangerine. The building, which dates back to 1897, was moved to that particular spot only in 1977, a decade after Hopper’s death. Otherwise there’s no way he could have missed it.
Hopper did paint the Highland Light (“Highland Light, North Truro”), a lighthouse next to the Highland Museum, in 1930. Though it was moved back from the crumbling cliff edge in 1996, National Park Service protection has ensured that the vista still resembles his painting. Other buildings now in the national seashore were out of Hopper’s range. He liked to paint from his car, something that quickly becomes apparent to anyone seeking out his Truro subject matter. So he missed the Dune Shacks — tiny huts of weathered wood in the Province Lands, an area of huge, smooth dunes and empty beaches that has been set aside as public lands since the 1600s. Ms. Minsky calls the shacks, which have no electricity or running water, “the last keepers of the old way.”
But more than landscape and buildings, Hopper painted the Outer Cape’s ineffable light, and that remains, heedless to the change it shines upon. “The light here has color,” said Rob DuToit, a landscape painter who has been living year-round in Truro since moving there from New York 22 years ago. “Blues are more blue, reds are more red. It’s similar to the south of France: the luminosity is so refractive; sea and sky mirror one another.”
I visited a plein air painting class Mr. DuToit was teaching as part of the summer program at Truro’s Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. About a dozen students had arrayed their easels facing Pamet Harbor at the edge of a parking lot of boat trailers. On the right side of the view, a lone clapboard house sat among trees above the salt marsh reeds. Hopper painted this house repeatedly, including in 1936 in “House with a Rain Barrel” and 1937 as “Mouth of the Pamet River — Full Tide.” Those canvases are notable for the openness of the landscape and for the way the house dominates the vista.
As the house shrank into the trees, rain began to fall. “Usually the students are pretty hardy,” said Mr. DuToit, as a woman working in chalk pastels watched her paper crinkle and her work spatter before the fat, uncultured drops.
But soon the rain stopped (the day later featured muggy sun, then strong, humid wind and at last one of those perfect sunsets that makes everything resemble a Hopper). Soft blue edged into the warm gray sky. “I like that the light changes so fast,” Mr. DuToit said. His own paintings have lately focused on the grays. “People call me a tonalist,” he said. “I could stand forever on Cold Storage Beach and paint there.” Certainly Hopper did: his paintings there include “House on Dune Edge” (1931) and “Cold Storage Plant” (1933).
The essence of this legendary Cape Cod light (“Legendary to the point of cliché,” Ms. Minsky said) is a mood that persists through many different palettes. A few midsummer days spent in Truro makes clear that the particular aspect of Cape light that appealed to Hopper comes when the summer sun starts to toy with setting, dropping just under the remains of an unsettled afternoon sky. It can last for hours, or just seconds, but that is what Hopper chose to carry back to his studio.
Remarkably, there are few resources that track Hopper’s places in Truro, and none exhaustively — the best is “Hopper’s Places,” by Gail Levin (second edition, University of California, 1998), which compares Hopper’s paintings in Cape Cod and elsewhere with more recent snapshots, but even that book does not detail the sites’ locations. Some places, like Corn Hill, are easy to find: they’re on the map, with the same names as the paintings. Some are gone: the gas station on Route 6 is now a firewood yard; the fish factory at Cold Storage Beach is a forgotten foundation; the train tracks are gone; the South Truro church has burned down.
But most are like Easter eggs hidden across the landscape, their locations folk knowledge passed along as oral tradition. When I stopped on a sand road with the photographer Chris Ramirez to take a photo of the vista Hopper depicted in “Cottages at North Truro” (1936), a man stopped his S.U.V. “Oh, you’re taking the Hopper shot,” he called out. “How did you find it?”
Finding Hopper in Truro is about looking, and about asking. When I reviewed Hopper’s Truro work, I was surprised to recognize houses from the immediate neighborhood of a cottage my wife and I moved and renovated a few years ago. And even the most unlikely sources can come in handy: “That’s my great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-granddad’s house,” my young nephew Zachary James told me, gazing at a copy of “Rich’s House” (1930) that I had brought with me. Sure enough, the building, which is now part of the Truro Vineyards, is little changed.
Even though Hopper did not mix much with Truro’s community, today he is beloved there. One evening, I was stepping out of Dutra’s Market at the crossroads that passes for downtown North Truro when I spotted a man working at a paint-spattered easel. He said he paints Dutra’s every year, so we chatted about Hopper’s “High Road” (1931), in which the shop’s rooftop appears in the distance. “Hopper is the man,” he said, and returned to his canvas.
MEDITATIONS ON FORM AND COLOR
HOPPER’S LANDSCAPES
Highland House Museum (16 Highland Road, North Truro; 508-487-3397; trurohistorical.org) features plenty to interest kids, and is the best spot to begin looking for Hopper’s places in Truro — one of them, Highland Light, is next door.
The Cape Cod National Seashore (www.nps.gov/caco) has thousands of acres of the kind of open landscape that drew Hopper to the Outer Cape. To get to the Dune Shacks, park at Snail Road and Route 6, and hike north across the dunes.
The Hopper House is not open to the public, but Fisher Beach is: walk south along the water’s edge and you’ll soon spot that big window looking down at you.
Truro Vineyards (Route 6A, North Truro; 508-487-6200; www.trurovineyardsofcapecod.com) is a working vineyard surrounding an old captain’s house. Stop by to explore one of the few buildings Hopper painted in the Outer Cape that is open to the public today (others include Highland Light and the Provincetown Library).
ART TODAY
Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill (10 Meetinghouse Road, Truro; 508-349-7511; www.castlehill.org) has more than 100 workshops each summer, making the newly renovated center the quickest way to become a part of Truro’s arts tradition.
This month, the Truro Public Library (5 Library Lane off Standish Way, North Truro; 508-487-1125, www.trurolibrary.org) is featuring a show of works influenced by Hopper in Truro. The outstanding library also hosts regular, and free, talks and events.
On Friday nights, Provincetown’s art galleries stay open late. Spend the evening strolling Commercial Street and see just how much Hopper’s work continues to stand out.
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