From Joe Transue on Facebook on 2/12, as a comment on my 2/11 posting “On the faux-Hopper watch”, about Waiting for the train (an image that was merely inspired by Edward Hopper (1892-1967), not actually by him):
(#1) JT reported that this image came up on his feed out of nowhere, with the label: Edward Hopper. Locomotive 1944; there’s a lot to be said here, but one thing is absolutely clear: it is not a painting by Hopper; there are excellent catalogs of Hopper’s paintings, and neither this image (or anything like it) or this title (or anything like it) appears in the catalogs — but then it turns out that Hopper spent years (resentfully) churning out illustrations, for magazines and for advertisements, just to pay his bills, and these haven’t been catalogued, so who knows?
More things that are absolutely clear: that this image was in fact used in an ad (in Life magazine) in 1944, for ALCO (the American Locomotive Company); that the locomotive in the ad is an ALCO DL-109 diesel engine built between late 1939 and the spring of 1944; and that this ad appeared at a time when Hopper had been recognized as a major figure in American art and was in the midst of one of his most productive periods (in the 1930s and early 1940s, he painted New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944), among others), and cannot imaginably have been resorting to commercial illustration to pay his bills in 1944.
So where does #1 come from?
