The Bowdoin College Museum of Art's exhibition, "Edward Hopper's Maine," is one of its most successful to date.
Andrew W. Mellon Curator Fellow Diana Tuite co-curated the exhibition with Director Kevin Salatino.
Tuite remarked that in the exhibit's first month alone, "approximately 15,000 people have visited the show, whereas annual attendance is usually around 25,000."
The exhibition showcases the works that Edward Hopper painted or drew over the course of nine different summers in Maine between 1914 and 1929.
The show's subject matter may account for its local popularity, but it has reached audiences far from Brunswick.
The exhibion has made headlines in The Washington Post, on MSNBC, and in the Japanese newspaper, Mainichi Daily News.
Tuite said that the show has been a goal of Salatino's since day one.
"I think it was a show that Kevin, when he arrived here in 2009, was really surprised had not happened yet," said Tuite.
Viewers familiar with Hopper's later works will be thrilled by the unprecedented gathering of his coastal paintings in the exhibition's first room, the Bernard and Barbro Osher Gallery.
Thirty of the 32 small oil paintings Hopper painted over the course of four summers on Monhegan Island between 1916 and 1919 hang on the walls.
"These paintings have never been seen together," Tuite said. "They have been sitting in the Whitney's storage room since Hopper passed away in 1967 and were donated to the Whitney by his widow."
Seen together, these works show Hopper's intense observation of nature and expresses a motif of Maine's rocky shoreline.
According to the exhibition's catalogue, these paintings "represent his most sustained meditation on a single theme." To Tuite, these paintings portray Hopper as a "very cerebral" artist who meditated intensely upon his work.
Indeed, Hopper made conscious stylistic changes as he matured as an artist.
The group of 30 small oil paintings at the beginning of the show feature audacious painterly brushstrokes resonant of Impressionism while maintaining a darker side through the use of intense color.
The rest of the exhibit, however, is more typical of the mature Hopper: lighter colors and more controlled brushstrokes fill large-scale oil and watercolor paintings.
The later works are not only more familiar to most viewers, but they display much of what Hopper set out to do as he matured, which, Tuite said, was "to play with space, shadow and obstacles to vision."
It seems that this desire to work with space and shadows led Hopper to make the claim that his "aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of [his] most intimate impressions of nature."
As two visitors passed by this quotation, which is painted on a wall in the first gallery space, one asked his companion, "Have you ever been to Monhegan?" The companion did not respond, but the visitor continued, "Well it looks exactly like this."
"Edward Hopper's Maine" will be on view through October 16.