Hopper's Shakespeare at Dusk will be offered in Sotheby's American art sale in New York this May.
Courtesy of Sotheby's
Coinciding with the date scholars believe to be William Shakespeares birthday, Sothebys announced today that it will offer Edward Hoppers Shakespeare at Dusk (1935) in its forthcoming American Art sale in New York on 21 May. The oil painting depicts a statue of the playwright in Central Park, made by John Quincy Adam Ward, captured at dusk. It is part of a series of New York cityscapes, a subject that the American artist began exploring early in his career while studying under the Realist artist Robert Henri. The work is estimated to fetch $7m-$10m.
Hopper was known as a literature lover and his works contain the occasional reference to his poetry and prose proclivities. Kayla Carlsen, the head of American Art at Sothebys in New York, says this particular work “possesses a sense of stillness and quietude that is found in the artists most important and celebrated works”.
His appreciation for Shakespeare was noted in his wifes diaries, according to scholar Gail Levin. Josephine Nivison-Hopper, a fellow painter, wrote in 1949 that her husband read Shakespeare to her while he posed for her paintings. “While he posed, and while she did chores, Edward took to reading aloud to her again—sometimes songs from Shakespeare, Villons Ballade des Dames du Tempes Jadis, T.S. Eliots essays”, Levin writes in Hoppers 1995 biography.
Levin also suggests that Hoppers interest in literature “helps to characterise his particular brand of Realism”. She adds: “Signs of Hoppers engagement with literature emerge in his boyhood… Three of Ralph Waldo Emersons subjects in his [1850 collection of essays] Representative Men—Plato, Shakespeare, and Goethe—were the only figures in European literature that Hopper ever related to pictures he painted.”
Sothebys says the work overtly suggests Shakespeares influence on Hoppers work, particularly of the poets description of autumnal twilight in Sonnet 73, one of his most famous works:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must exRead More – Source
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