Purchase this very special program to raise money for Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center with Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Ph.D. senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

In the summer of 1923, Edward Hopper went to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a bustling seaport and artist colony about thirty miles up the coast from Boston. It proved to be the turning point of his life. He met his future wife Jo Nivison and began painting in watercolor -- lighthouses, elegant homes of ship captains, ramshackle dwellings of Italian immigrants, and the trawlers that plied the Atlantic. When he showed them to Frank Rehn a year later, the dealer offered the forty-one-year-old Hopper his first ever gallery exhibition. Virginia Mecklenburg will trace the now forgotten implications behind watercolors that prompted Hopper to examine the relationship between the past and contemporary life.