Watercolor and pencil on white wove paper, 1899. 230x170 mm; 9x6 3/8 inches. Signed and dated in watercolor, lower right recto, and inscribed with the verse "Maiden, wait," the ripple saith; "Wait awhile, for I am death!," from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, 1895, in ink lower center recto.
Ex-collection the artist, until 1967; his widow, Jo Hopper, until 1968; Reverend Arthayer R. Sanborn, Nyack, until 2005; Alexander Gallery, New York, courtesy of Kennedy Galleries, New York, until October, 2007; thence to the current owner.
Published in Levin, Edward Hopper, A Catalogue Raisonne, volume II, page 7, figure W-15.
While still at Nyack Union High School, just north of New York City, Hopper (1882-1967) created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove, 1895, which evidences his early interest in realism and natural subjects. After high school, Hopper studied at the Correspondence School of Illustrating, New York. Within a year, he transferred to the New York Institute of Art and Design where he studied from 1900-1906, and was influenced by Robert Henri, William Merritt Chase and Kenneth Hayes Miller, alongside classmates George Bellows and Rockwell Kent.
Hopper began working as an illustrator in 1905 with C. C. Phillips & Company, New York. His illustrations greatly supplemented his income through the early 1900s. Not until 1924, after having sold out the entirety of his second one-man exhibition, at Rehn Gallery, New York, in 1924, did he find sound financial footing through sales of his paintings.
According to Levin, among the illustrations Hopper produced in art school for literary works by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, he also, "Sketched Rudyard Kipling's Private Mulvaney from the cycle of soldier stories that made its author famous. Kipling's work made such an impression on the young Hopper that even when he wrote as an adult, he referred to the poetry."
