Many of Hopper’s most iconic images—his moody “house portraits”—were painted in Gloucester, Massachusetts, but he was an extensive traveler beyond the quaint seaside town. “You know how beautiful things are when you’re travelling,” he wrote in 1956 [as quoted by Harriet G. Warkel, Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Lobby’ (2008), p. 21]. The painter first went to Gloucester in 1912 with his friend Leon Kroll, and would summer there in 1923 and 1924. By 1923, the town was “teeming with artists,” as one historian put it, including John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Milton Avery [Virginia Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (1999), p. 23]. Hopper seems to have been untroubled by the town’s growing popularity—his works from these years are noted for their unpeopled houses and their solitude—but by 1925 he nonetheless decided to summer elsewhere. He chose another destination of increasing popularity among painters: Santa Fe, New Mexico.

New Mexico had been a destination for artists since the turn of the century, but only in the immediately preceding years had it begun to draw modernists. Hopper’s friend Sloan bought a house there in 1920, and Hopper’s former teacher Robert Henri had visited the Southwest in 1916, 1917, and 1922. Upon the strength of these and other endorsements, Hopper ventured west in June of 1925, staying on through much of September.

Hopper painted about a dozen watercolors during his summer in New Mexico. Without the familiar dormers of New England’s seaside houses, Hopper’s subject matter ranged widely across those few works. He executed three beautiful observations of locomotives and railroad lines, along with a single landscape featuring a figure (La Pentitente), and at least two meticulous views of Santa Fe style architecture (St. Francis’ Towers, and Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe). Many of the artists that painted in New Mexico reveled in the contact with the local culture, but Hopper avoided the “merely observational” work that many of his Ashcan colleagues pursued. “Though I studied with Robert Henri I was never a member of the Ash Can School [sic.]. It had a sociological trend which didn’t interest me” [as quoted by Harriet G. Warkel, Paper to Paint: Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Lobby’ (2008), p. 19]. As he eschewed the sociology of the Ashcan School, so too did he find little of import in examining with brush the European influences upon the Santa Fe style of architecture. Virginia Mecklenburg notes that Hopper did not send Saint Michael’s College, Santa Fe to Rehn Gallery, his dealer, proposing that “it may well be that he was uncomfortable presenting works representing a Europeanized aesthetic” [Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (1999), p. 45]. By contrast, the more humble structures of small towns and adobe houses seems to have fit perfectly into Hopper’s growing vernacular of quiet, evocative scenes.

Poplars is one of the works from Santa Fe that the artist did deliver to Rehn. He he noted the date of its deposit at the gallery as October 15th, 1925, in his notebook—very soon after his return to New York [Gail Levin, The Complete Watercolors of Edward Hopper (2001), p. 92]. Hopper had begun showing with Frank K. M. Rehn in 1924, after his work was rejected by John Kraushaar for being “too stark” [as quoted in Mecklenburg, Edward Hopper: The Watercolors (1999), p. 36]. Rehn was uniquely positioned as both a committed Americanist and broad-minded enough to embrace the sometimes radical eccentricities of artists like Hopper and others of his generation.

Hopper’s first show at Rehn Gallery sold out, and he continued to do well commercially with Rehn, who helped establish Hopper in the distinctly American lineage of Winslow Homer. When The New York Times reviewed Rehn’s 1926 group exhibition, “Today in American Art,” the reviewer heaped praise on Hopper, whose Sunday received the top paragraph of the review, and upon the gallerist: “Mr. Rehn has done very well” [“Many Types of Art Are Now on Exhibition,” in The New York Times, Feb. 28, 1926, p. 184]. By March of 1926, The New York Times was endorsing Rehn’s view connecting Homer to Hopper. “You can put your finger on the weighted and clean edge of an Edward Hopper…and call [it] American,” the reviewer observed [“New Art Viewed in the Galleries” in The New York Times, March 28, 1926, p. 187], continuing, “Winslow Homer is the great man.” Hopper had become the next great man in this line.

Hopper only submitted seven of his Santa Fe watercolors to Rehn in October of 1925—not enough to justify a full show, despite the overwhelming success of the previous year’s exhibition. The Santa Fe pictures would not be exhibited until April of 1926, when they would hang along with eleven views of Gloucester and twenty-one prints at the St. Botolph Club in Boston [Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (1980), p. 302]. The present work sold after the show by way of Rehn to a San Francisco collector. If Hopper’s “weighted edge and clean line” was distinctly American, Poplars is distinctly Hopperian: Hopper’s own notebook records the work a “Poplars (& adobe hut, deep blue sky). Strong silhouette against deep blue sky” [as quoted in Levin, The Complete Watercolors of Edward Hopper (2001), p. 92]. While Levin notes elsewhere that during Hopper’s New Mexico trip “he found it difficult to work with such picturesque beauty and intensity of light,” he nonetheless captures something distinctly his own with the poplar’s “strong silhouette against deep blue sky” [Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist (1980), p. 50]. The late-day sunlight rakes horizontally across the landscape, a rural presage of the painter’s 1930 masterpiece, Early Sunday Morning (Whitney Museum of American Art).